new-sysadmin-lecture.md (1594B)
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- title: New sysadmin lecture
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- You're a production sysadmin now. That comes with certain responsibilities. In
- short:
- 1. Respect the user's privacy, and look at only what you must.
- 2. Think before you type.
- 3. With great power comes great responsibility.
- Assorted tips:
- - Practice your changes on localhost first.
- - Ask for help if you need it.
- - Always run your SQL queries in a transaction.
- - `SELECT things, you, want FROM x;` is generally better than `SELECT * FROM x;`
- when considering the user's privacy.
- - Share information on a need-to-know basis, both with people and with
- computers.
- - Avoid doing things that cannot be undone.
- ## Spear Phishing
- Because you now have access to production systems, you may be a target for spear
- phishing. A bad actor may target you directly in a social engineering attack in
- an attempt to get you to leverage your access to mistakenly compromise the
- system. For example, someone may impersonate another admin and ask you to add an
- SSH key to a server. You need to be aware of this risk.
- If you receive a request to leverage your access for any reason, double check
- the veracity of the request. Is the person on IRC identified with NickServ for
- the correct account? Is the email they sent DKIM signed and verified from the
- right sender? If in doubt, ask for a secondary form of authentication, such as a
- PGP challenge.
- This also applies to normal requests from users - don't let someone impersonate
- another user in an attempt to gain access to or manipulate their account. Be
- especially careful with requests from users with 2FA enabled.