What would you do if an old employer, calls you after firing you four years ago and demands you share a password you used ages ago? A Reddit user in a similar situation shared how he was threatened with a lawsuit when he couldn’t remember the password.
There are toxic workplaces, and then there are workplaces which go beyond the known definitions of stupidity. A man recently took to Reddit to share an ordeal they are going through, in which a former company he used to work for, is suing him for a bizarre reason, four years after the company laid him off.
Reddit user u/NimboStratusSuck told the ‘Antiwork’ community about his former company wanting to sue him.
Here’s how the story goes. The user NimboStratusSuck worked as the manager of a networking team at a medium/large network engineering firm for over 20 years, before he was terminated in 2019.
Image Credit: Reddit/NimboStratusSuck
As a manager of the networking team, he was responsible for the passwords for various equipment and routers, depending on their use cases. The team also had the administrative passwords, stored in a safe, digital, password-protected vault.
Image Credit: Reddit/NimboStratusSuck
Four years after he was laid off, the routers at the company where he used to work locked everyone out of their systems and had to be reset. The only problem is, no one has the passwords to reset the routers. As for our protagonist, he was locked out of his system the moment he was fired.
Image Credit: Reddit/NimboStratusSuck
Also the vault that had the password, was taken offline and removed two years after he was fired.
Image Credit: Reddit/NimboStratusSuck
Because of being locked out of the system the company where our protagonist worked, can’t do pretty much anything, including paying their current staff. They called our protagonist, demanding the old passwords back and when they were told, that he couldn’t produce them, they threatened to sue him.
There’s a lot to unpack here.
Certain regulations or employment agreements frequently govern how a company’s information is managed. It plainly defines the dos and don’ts both while working and after departing. This is required to ensure the security of the company’s data and can assist in avoiding or resolving any connected disputes that may emerge.
Whether mentioned in the job contract, a non-disclosure agreement, or elsewhere, such rules may require departing workers not to share confidential information, such as trade secrets, customer data, or logins. The OP may have felt compelled to delete the passwords from his mind as soon as he stepped out the door.
Misuse of confidential information could endanger the business. According to Redentry, when it comes to cybersecurity, individuals with access to private information pose the greatest danger. Furthermore, according to Business Wire, approximately 12 per cent of outgoing workers take such information with them when they leave the workplace.
Clear rules and policies regarding how passwords are dealt with have become essential in order to prevent cybercrime attacks. Such dangers can result in cybersecurity attacks, which are not uncommon. Small companies, for example, experienced over 700,000 assaults in 2020 alone. Companies, however, are not the only ones at danger. In 2022, approximately 422 million individuals will have been impacted by data breaches.
Passwords should be changed at least once every three months, according to some safety specialists. Others think that if you have a good one, there is no reason to change it unless you assume it has been compromised. Regardless, most of them would concur that it should be more inventive than 123456. Unfortunately, it is probably the second most prevalent password, trailing only the word “password” itself.
Obviously, people jumped at the opportunity to voice their opinions and how the OP should proceed in such a situation.
Image Credit: Reddit/NimboStratusSuckImage Credit: Reddit/NimboStratusSuckImage Credit: Reddit/NimboStratusSuck
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