Ask Lemmy

Military equipment is sold to the PRC and mislabeled as COTS, i.e. civilian.

One company I worked at had more full-time collections people than sales people. Our products were a lot cheaper than our competitors, and it attracted a lot of customers with no money.

Another company I worked at ignored all "first notice" bills they ran up. CFO told me that if a company wanted paid, they needed to send a second notice.

I did some IT work at a hospital, patient records including names, addresses, conditions and doctor's notes (inc mental health notes) were stored in the database in plain text. You had to have admin access to the database (which I did), but I was stunned that I could browse anyone's entire medical information. A few weeks after I left I sent an anonymous email to a couple of people letting them know how bad it was - I didn't use my real one just in case they may have come after me for looking at the records.

Back when I managed a Blockbuster Video, most stores ran at a loss thanks to theft.

The real reason most stores failed wasn't because DVDs were going out. It was because we couldn't stem the flow of money out the door thanks to thieves.

Nice try fbi

The building, used by several hundred employees, had a security systems with 4-digit codes. I've been part of group of people who liked to work late times, and the building would lock at midnight -- the box by the door would start beeping and you would need to unlock it within a minute or so, or "proper alarm" would ensue.

However, to unlock the alarm you did not need your card -- all you needed to do was to enter any valid code. Guess what was the chance that, say, 1234 was someone's valid code? Yes.

We've been all using some poor guy's code 1234, and after several years, when he left the company we just guessed some other obvious code (4321) and kept using that.

By the way, after entering the code to the box by the door, it would shortly display name of the person whom the code "belonged" to. One of our colleagues took it as a personal secret project to slowly go through all 10000 possible codes and collect the names of the people, just for the kick of it.

(By the way, I don't work for that company anymore, and more importantly, the company does not use that building anymore, so don't get any ideas! 🙃 )

Every time we notified anyone about a potential illegal breach of gdpr that could get us fined or sued, admin pretended they had never been informed because the changes would take too long and collide with their plans to "revamp everything, reinvent the platform, and rebrand".

I should have whistleblown them myself if it were not for the fact that doing so would probably get some previous employees fired rather than hurt the company.

We didn't investigate an online theft from any bank account unless it was over US $100k.

My previous employer - a multi-billion dollar internet search company would secretly listen to people's conversation via their mobile devices then place ads on the same devices (e.g in the browser search results or at the start of videos) based on keywords from the conversations, this had to be kept hidden of course and this large well-known company shall remain nameless.

They let the intern access the production db. The company is one of the biggest hosting and internet service companies in the country. The db was SQL but had no primary key.

I was the intern. I normalized it to 3NF as part of my internship project.

Shit, piss or vomit has graced just about every surface at your public pool and the staff are constantly fighting a losing battle against it. Nothing is washed just power sprayed till it looks clean.

The buildings alarm code was 0711. Guess where I worked....