Ask HN: What's your work computer exit strategy?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8324209

by dailen • 12 years ago

11 16 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Friend of mine was recently let go from our place of employment and that got me thinking. Should I have an exit strategy for leaving my work computer?

I don't mean like destroying, taking, or anything of illegal nature but I mean removing secure things like access to my password manager, browser profile, etc.

Granted a lot of this should be 100% secured 100% of the time but after 4 years I get tired of entering some passwords over and over and over.

So leads me to wonder if this should be some sort of emergency switch like an IFTTT trigger or something that triggers the deletion of certain things on certain devices should I trigger the emergency switch.

Thoughts?

robinduckett• 12 years ago

Nothing on my work laptop is sacred, work stuff is kept in the cloud or bitbucket/github, personal stuff is on dropbox. I would lose how I've set my dev environment up, but that's about it. I'd just wipe/reinstall.

Spoom• 12 years ago

This is the best answer. Keep personal stuff on your personal system. Don't do anything personal on a work-owned system (or if you do, do it in incognito-mode or something).

Most times, if you're let go, they won't give you the opportunity to wipe your system anyway, they'll just lock you out.

Plus, you know, you don't want to be accused of destroying company property.

esw• 12 years ago

Honestly, I don't install or save anything on work computers that isn't related to work.

a3n• 12 years ago

Minimize things you can't bear to lose or reveal, both electronic, and physical things in your drawers etc. As for physical, I can walk out the door with a small plastic grocery bag (which I actually keep in my desk), and if I couldn't have what I'd put in the bag I wouldn't think twice about it.

I have a few pictures I've uploaded from my camera. They can have them. Same for a few O'Reilly ebooks.

I have a few Firefox bookmarks, and browsing history. They can have them.

I have the LastPass plugin installed, but I don't have it set to stay logged in. I'm always logged out of LastPass, and if I need to get to a site with a LastPass password, I log in, do the thing, and log out.

The only hole that I've pondered is that I'm always logged in to pinboard. I suppose the solution there is to change my pinboard password the evening after being let go, if I remember to do it.

nobleach• 12 years ago

Your company may differ, but many have a policy that states ANYTHING you do on a company owned machine is considered open for scrutiny. Some places have a semblance of privacy - meaning they're not going to read your Gmail or mess with your Facebook profile. Upon termination, you surrender any right you have to the data on your machine. So to echo the sentiment of others. Don't use your work machine for private data. This can be difficult, as it's easy to take your laptop on vacation to "do a little work"... and then wind up wanting to check your facebook. For that, I'd suggest logging out when you're done. Don't allow Chrome to remember passwords.

PhantomGremlin• 12 years ago

Here's the most important thing to remember:

   DO NOT USE YOUR WORK EMAIL
   FOR PERSONAL COMMUNICATION

You will lose access to that email on the day you are "let go".

edit: same thing for a work phone number.

GFischer• 12 years ago

Also, if you want to keep in touch with people, make sure they have some way to contact you - not that much of an issue in the social networks age, but in places I've worked at, workers leaving would email most everyone with their contact info.

Someone1234• 12 years ago

So leads me to wonder if this should be some sort of emergency switch like an IFTTT trigger or something that triggers the deletion of certain things on certain devices should I trigger the emergency switch.

Wouldn't take much for that to be misunderstood and for you to get a nice friendly visit from the cops. YOU might know that it only deleted "your" stuff. But your employer might not.

I agree with everyone else in this thread: Stop leaving stuff on work computers. Period. You use a password manager, log it out every single day. You want access to files? Install e.g. DropBox but log in every single day, etc (or use your phone as a USB storage device).

dailen2• 12 years ago

Wouldn't take much for that to be misunderstood and for you to get a nice friendly visit from the cops.

That's a very good point, I hadn't considered if there's a suspicion of what was done and what for (since I was only considering personal privacy)

Okay so what about a personal device like a laptop or desktop you own?

dailen2• 12 years ago

Actually I believe that question almost needs it's own thread

joeclark77• 12 years ago

I use LastPass as my password manager. You can set it so that you need to enter your (one) password when you turn on the browser. Tell your sites not to remember your login -- the LastPass browser plugin will remember it for you. That way if you're no longer employed, no one without the LastPass password can get into your personal e-mail. You could, of course, have the browser remember logins for work sites, as there's nothing secret there.

I would also suggest separating your cloud storage. If you have a private Dropbox account, for example, use one of the other services (e.g. OneDrive) for storing work documents. There should be as little mixing as possible.

HelloNurse• 12 years ago

A bootable USB pendrive with a live Linux distribution is perfectly suitable for nuking hard drives as fast and conveniently as possible and making sure nobody "inherits" your viruses and badly installed software.

Removing data should actually consist of reloading the last backup on your next computer, at worst launching your regular backup scripts one last time; if you need to improvise an ad-hoc exodus on short notice forgetting something is unavoidable.

sriram_sun• 12 years ago

Happened to me a few days back. I quit, but was asked to leave pronto.

1. I've been using a password manager I purchased. That was the first thing I uninstalled.

2. Unlink DropBox. Delete the DropBox folder.

3. 4-years is a pretty long time. If I ended up using my work laptop for personal stuff (for instance a friend asks me to review their resume, scanned docs, pictures, rental applications etc.), I create a folder called personal that I can delete. Usually this would be under my DropBox folder anyway.

If I get walked out (i.e. I don't have access to my computer), I wouldn't know what to do. Ideally you would expect IT to wipe the hard disk and re-image the whole disk. I'm not sure it happens as often as it should.

fencepost• 12 years ago

Well-designed cloud services will have a way for you to "de-authenticate" devices. For some of these you may need to be on a real computer not just a phone/tablet.

For some of the synced cloud storage options you may be better off moving all of the files out of that provider's control from another computer so that the removal will have time to propagate back to the PC in question - not all of them offer remote wipe capabilities.

In LastPass, go into your vault in a browser, then Settings. There are areas for both Mobile Devices and Trusted Computers, from which you can disable/delete each entry.

In Dropbox, go into your Account settings, then Security and you can see and manage a list of all devices and applications you've linked with your account. Note that you can ONLY do remote wipe of your Dropbox files if you have Dropbox Pro or Business, but you could presumably sign up for just 1 month of Pro.

If you're using 1Password, the Dropbox cleanup should take care of that since it stores passwords in a folder structure under your Dropbox account.

Google has something similar, particularly if you're using 2-factor authentication. I'm not sure about remote wipe.

Box.com has something similar, go into your account settings and look for the Security tab at the top, but there doesn't seem to be any remote wipe capability.

For bookmarks, I didn't see anything along these lines in the XMarks documentation or my control panel, but I've submitted a ticket to ask them about it.

That's just a starting point, details will obviously depend on what specific services you use.

kogir• 12 years ago

You should operate under the assumption you could lose your computer at any point, for a variety of reasons. It's far more likely you'll drop it, spill something, lose it, or have it stolen.

I keep everything important elsewhere. Code is in source control. Documentation is alongside code or on the wiki. Personal email and work email are in separate Google Apps accounts. There's nothing I care about residing solely on my laptop.

For security against theft, I use FileVault.

If work wanted me out right now, I'd turn off my computer and walk away. Without my password they can't decrypt anything on the drive, everything the company cares about is elsewhere, as is everything I care about.

Ignore this advice at your peril. I know countless friends who have freaked when their laptops were stolen in SF. I just get a replacement and set everything back up.

codeonfire• 12 years ago

Why would you use your work computer for anything but work? I treat it like someone else's property. You can also assume your employer is keylogging and watching your network traffic.

Ask HN: What's your work computer exit strategy?

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