Big IQ play from IT outsourcer: Can't create batch files if you can't save files. Of any kind

2020-10-05 07:15

Welcome back to Who, Me? Today's story comes from a reader Regomised as "Alan" and concerns the time he was instrumental in the accidental near-shutdown of an entire department of Her Majesty's Government.

Alan had been able to get at the verboten commands via the medium of a common-or-garden batch file combined with the trusting nature of the OS of the time.

Alan turned up for work the next day to find his account only had read-only access.

In order to stop naughty batch files from being created, the IT outsourcer had simply stopped the saving of any files, solving Alan's problem, but creating a huge swathe of new ones.

"There were," recalled Alan, "Some forthright 'discussions' concerning what had actually been asked for versus what had been delivered."

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/05/who_me/