4 ms·

"Dangerous" is probably the wrong word - anomalous is a better one. Most software doesn't need to know, say, how many entries there are in the Users table. It g

"Dangerous" is probably the wrong word - anomalous is a better one. Most software doesn't need to know, say, how many entries there are in the Users table. It generally is querying for a specific user, or a range of users with some particular property. It sounds like they had some software watching for any out-of-the-ordinary queries, which they then manually verified with the apparent person who was executing them. When that person had no idea what they were talking about, that's when the red flags went up.

sigi45 8y ago
Your example with the user table is a little bit 'bad'. Because yes i like to see statistics as an admin on how many user acounts are there :P
- deleted 8y ago
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- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  Well put. I think that anything I personally do while logged into a database when viewed from any higher level going to look anomalous. That said, I wonder if what’s going on here is that the admin account was never supposed to be used directly, so that’s why the alert triggered.
- bluntfang 8y ago
  well gosh i hope you're not running queries on the command line on a production database.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  So you routinely log in as an admin and run sql queries directly on a production DB? That seems quite a bit more "bad" than the example.
  - JetSpiegel 8y ago
    phpMyAdmin or something might run on behalf of the administrator and do these queries.
  - kakwa_ 8y ago
    I do it several times per day. When you are maintaining a piece of garbage application, completely undersized, absurdly opened in term of filtering and extremely badly designed, it's the only way to manage this mess, not to mention the times when I have to fix the DB by hand, replaying, with some manual tweaks, queries normaly executed by the application. And unfortunately, I don't think that's so uncommon.
    - munk-a 8y ago
      It's not particularly common but I've been in some what of a similar situation. If you're a senior techy person I'd suggest taking a bit of time to either find a new position (as I'm sure all of HN would echo, simply for your sanity) or I'd suggest taking that time to assemble a report about how your spend your hours each day and make sure it bubbles up past your manager to someone who deals with money. That sort of situation is constantly costing the company money for no good reason, it'd be fiscally sound to spell out these costs and contrast them with any estimates you could assemble on making the application start working again. Manually replaying queries is expensive, terrible, terrifying, and can potentially break data-integrity really badly.
      - ethbro 8y ago
        > assemble a report about how your spend your hours each day and make sure it bubbles up past your manager to someone who deals with money Assumes poster works at a company where management cares past "Does it work?" That's less rare than it used to be, but HN sometimes underappreciates how much of the economy is still governed by companies with CFOs who couldn't tell you the first thing about their enterprise infrastructure.
        munk-a 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
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sigi45 8y ago

Your example with the user table is a little bit 'bad'. Because yes i like to see statistics as an admin on how many user acounts are there :P

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
Well put. I think that anything I personally do while logged into a database when viewed from any higher level going to look anomalous. That said, I wonder if what’s going on here is that the admin account was never supposed to be used directly, so that’s why the alert triggered.
bluntfang 8y ago
well gosh i hope you're not running queries on the command line on a production database.
EpicEng 8y ago
So you routinely log in as an admin and run sql queries directly on a production DB? That seems quite a bit more "bad" than the example.
- JetSpiegel 8y ago
  phpMyAdmin or something might run on behalf of the administrator and do these queries.
- kakwa_ 8y ago
  I do it several times per day. When you are maintaining a piece of garbage application, completely undersized, absurdly opened in term of filtering and extremely badly designed, it's the only way to manage this mess, not to mention the times when I have to fix the DB by hand, replaying, with some manual tweaks, queries normaly executed by the application. And unfortunately, I don't think that's so uncommon.
  - munk-a 8y ago
    It's not particularly common but I've been in some what of a similar situation. If you're a senior techy person I'd suggest taking a bit of time to either find a new position (as I'm sure all of HN would echo, simply for your sanity) or I'd suggest taking that time to assemble a report about how your spend your hours each day and make sure it bubbles up past your manager to someone who deals with money. That sort of situation is constantly costing the company money for no good reason, it'd be fiscally sound to spell out these costs and contrast them with any estimates you could assemble on making the application start working again. Manually replaying queries is expensive, terrible, terrifying, and can potentially break data-integrity really badly.
    - ethbro 8y ago
      > assemble a report about how your spend your hours each day and make sure it bubbles up past your manager to someone who deals with money Assumes poster works at a company where management cares past "Does it work?" That's less rare than it used to be, but HN sometimes underappreciates how much of the economy is still governed by companies with CFOs who couldn't tell you the first thing about their enterprise infrastructure.
      - munk-a 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

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