Onboarding and switching

What are you going to find in the first two weeks that we do not know about?

Short answerAccounts for people who left, backups that have not been tested, and at least one system nobody realized the business depends on.

Not hypothetically. These are what we find at nearly every company of size when we take over:

  • Active accounts for former employees, usually including at least one with elevated access, and often licenses still being paid for
  • Backups that run but have never been restored, and frequently a system that was never included at all
  • A load bearing machine nobody knew about. An old workstation under a desk running a service the business depends on, no backup, no support
  • Shared credentials for systems that should have individual accounts, which breaks accountability and any audit trail
  • Multi factor authentication with exceptions. Usually a service account or an executive who asked to be excluded, which is precisely the account an attacker wants
  • Licensing that does not match reality, in both directions
  • Unsupported software still in production because a vendor said it could not be upgraded and nobody revisited it

None of this indicates anybody did anything wrong. It is what accumulates in a business that grew faster than its documentation. You get the list with dates and severity, and you decide what gets fixed and in what order.