19 June 2008

The moral debate

I read an article on news24.com that says:
One in three information technology professionals abuses administrative passwords to access confidential data such as colleagues' salary details, personal e-mails or board-meeting minutes, according to a survey.
http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0,,2-13-1443_2343432,00.html
This is a pretty concerning statistic. We (Netowrk Admins) all know that we can access anything in our organisation, but it is our moral responsability not to do so. I know that I can get my hands on any information that I want, any time, from anywhere, but I choose not to as it is not right.
The problem with network administrators is that their role is often missunderstood and that management does not have a clue that they have access to this information. The other problem is that IT administrators are also mostly the implementers of the file security on the networks and that we hold the Administrator rights which allow us to access any information.
It is a double edged sword, we need access to the files to assist when something goes wrong, but we should not be able to see the contents of certain files.

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