One such place was a room was in a remote building, where myself and one or another of my colleagues had to cover once a week in case anybody down there needed technical support. We used to call this place "the black hole." It was small, dark, dingy and out of the way.
In this room we had a PC for our use and a huge, tower server that at that time was used for running online exams software. Not an ideal place to keep it, but it did the job well enough for a long time, until...
For several weeks we kept have very strange problems with it. For instance, sometimes we would find that the server had been powered down or would be running mind-numbingly slow due to lack of resources.
Then came the final straw, we rebooted the server one day after it become completely unresponsive and found that it was infected with several viruses.
We started investigating, but were unable to determine the cause of all these issues. At that time we didn't have a lot of monitoring in place although it had antivirus and a firewall running. It was also locked in a secure room.
During this time numerous exams were interrupted and/or cancelled due to these problems.
One day, about a fortnight later a couple of us turned up at the office earlier than usual, only to find the door unlocked, open and a stranger in our mitts.
He was sitting in our office hunched over a keyboard and monitor, clacking away and didn't notice us watching in disbelief as he surfed the web for gambling tips and dodgy software (which he tried to download.) Anything that seemed to pop up on the screen he would click on. We were just glad he wasn't on XXX sites as we would probably have been watching for a lot longer; but the result would have been the same.
We glanced at each other and grimaced, composing ourselves for the onslaught.
"Hum hmm" we coughed as the guy jumped two feet in the air and almost unbalanced his chair. He clackety clacked on the keyboard to minimise the internet explorer window that was showing a well-dressed man hold a deck of playing cards. Too late buddy... BUSTED!
It didn't take us long to put two and two together and come up with a huge resounding four. We in the IT department take our maths very seriously.
"What are you doing?" We enquire.
"Nothing, just looking something up" he answered, a little nervous as he wasn't quite over the shock at being found out.
We didn't think he understood the question, so we tried again. "No, what are you doing... in here?"
"I needed to get on the internet" he claimed smugly. It's a server..!
"Ok, but why are you in here? This is a locked office and that's a server NOT a PC."
"Oh I have a key; I have had one for ages." Hmmm... News to us.
He was a tutor that worked in that building, somehow he had acquired a key to our room, and we still don't know where he got it. Every day he was coming in early or staying late, to get into our office, logon to the server and would sit, surfing the web even though he had a perfectly good laptop issued to him by the company.
"But why are you coming in here? This is a private office and that is a server!"
"I am entitled to use the internet."
"But you are using a server" It was no good, it didn't matter how many times we said it, he just couldn't see the problem. "Do you know the amount of problems we have been having with that? There are dozens of computers in this building alone and you have your own, so why do you need to surf the web on a company server?"
He didn't have an answer, at least not one that wouldn't incriminate him.
"Do you know how many viruses you have infected that server with? Do you know how much down time it has had over the past month? There has been disruption to the service every day. We have had to cancel no end of exams."
Silence... He didn't even apologise. He just saw it as an inconvenience to him that he had been caught. He got up and walked away from us moaning about the lack of help he got from the IT department, and complaining loudly that we were preventing him from doing his job. More like he was pissed because our interruption had possibly cost him a tenner on an online poker game.
We changed the lock that very day and because of this guy, we eventually had to wipe the server and rebuild it completely. The guy was put on a disciplinary, but I don't think it did any good, Sad to say, with the lack of monitoring and reporting logs at that time we had almost no evidence. The guy was a menace to the IT society for as long as he worked here.
Needless to say that man became public enemy number one in our department's top ten most unwanted and we didn't let him forget it.
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