Troubleshooting Causes Trouble

The Network: A manufacturing facility in the US East Coast with 50+ servers and 100+ workstations

The Expectation: User logins fire scripts which map shared network drives properly

The Catch: A user login for a contractor(!) was set to have a password that never expired and all kinds of privilege

The Find: For some reason, the network drives would not map properly and allow the contractor access to the specific shared folders. In an effort to debug the Sys Admin increased privilege on the account and then made the password expiry set to “never”. Of course, this totally compromises the network and its assets!

The Fix: Restore password expiry; restore privileges to minimum needed (in fact this account was disabled as the contractor task was completed).

The Lesson: Shooting trouble with a loaded shotgun can result in foot injury.