Wet Paint, Dry Holes: AkzoNobel Slaps on Another Coat of Security Failure
Oh look, another multinational corporation has managed to fuck up their cybersecurity so spectacularly that they might as well have painted a giant target on their own datacenter in fluorescent fucking pink. AkzoNobel—these are the wankers who make Dulux and every other tin of overpriced wall slop—has finally admitted that their US operations got bent over and railed by cybercriminals. Color me fucking shocked.
Apparently, these paint-mixing geniuses discovered “unauthorized access” to their systems, which is corporate-speak for “some 16-year-old script kiddie with a Russian VPN just pwned our entire infrastructure while we were busy arguing about whether ‘eggshell’ or ‘magnolia’ is the more secure color scheme.” They’ve had to shut down operations faster than a user who realizes they’ve been caught browsing tractor porn on the conference room PC.
Of course, the suits are being tighter than a miser’s arse about what actually got stolen—probably because admitting “we stored all our passwords in a spreadsheet called PASSWORDS.xls on the public file share” wouldn’t look great in the annual report. But you can bet your last pint it’s ransomware. It’s always fucking ransomware. These brain-dead morons probably clicked on an email attachment titled “Urgent_Invoice.exe” from someone claiming to be “Mike from Paint Support” and then wondered why their files suddenly had extensions that looked like someone sneezed on the keyboard.
Now their IT staff—poor bastards—are working 90-hour weeks while management stands behind them asking moronic questions like “Can’t you just… you know… hack them back?” and “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Meanwhile, the PR department is vomiting out the usual word-salad about “taking this matter extremely seriously” and “implementing additional security measures.” Yeah, because waiting until after the fucking breach is the optimal time to start giving a shit, you incompetent shitgibbons. Maybe spend less time matching color palettes and more time patching your goddamn Exchange server, yeah?
BOFH War Story: This reminds me of the time I caught a luser “touching up” the server room walls with leftover AkzoNobel gloss during a maintenance window. The fuckwit had got paint on the emergency power cutoff and was leaving brush strokes on the RAID array. I told him the enamel fumes were “perfectly safe server ventilation” and locked the door for six hours while I “verified the air quality.” When Facilities finally cut him out, he was high as a kite, naked, and trying to mate with the KVM switch while singing the company mission statement. I sprayed him with turpentine and told HR he’d been “performing unauthorized hardware modifications.” They promoted me for “preventing electrical hazards.” The room still smells like Dutch chemicals and broken dreams.
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