User access concerns raised at Aragon Council session

♦ Seiz wants policy in place for prevent digital credential sharing, Mayor admits he required employees passwords

Mayor Garry Baldwin admitted that he has login information previously when he took office in 2016 for all city employees, but that information is sealed away and unused.

He said “the passwords are likely no good at this point” and added that he “only had to open an envelope just once” during a discussion of one particular policy that Seiz wanted addressed during Aragon’s latest meeting.

That was to provide penalties for employees sharing their passwords with anyone – including the potential for termination – to reduce the risk of liability to the city itself if a data breach were to happen and information leaked out that shouldn’t be shared.

Baldwin said during that discussion that he required employees to give him a copy of their login information for both the cityowned computer systems and e-mail in case he were required to look over their information if an employee were found to be violating city policies in a way that utilized the city’s digital infrastructure.

“I still have that folder in there, and I’m betting that none of the passwords in there are any good,” he said.

By way of explanation, Baldwin said that it was a measure to protect him from employees who meant ill when his term began.

“When I first came into office, I had a fear that we were going to have some employees to retaliate,” Baldwin said. “One did. I had everyone on the first day write down their username and password and place it in an envelope. Most of them have not ever been opened.”

He said “the one person went through and wiped his computer clean of city e-mails, and did whatever.”

He repeated a third time “Since that time I’ve not had to open a single envelope,” though he said before that “most” were left unopened.

Baldwin’s procedure instead is to call the IT company contracted to handle the city’s networking infrastructure and have the computer and e-mail access locked down.

“We do have a couple of applications where there is a joint login, but we don’t pay for it, and we’re moving off of it to Harris. We’ve already moved part of it to another piece of software that does have individual logins,” he added.

Seiz then revealed that she was told by a person she wouldn’t share any information about that documents previously saved on a city computer and backup server were deleted without their knowledge. She did not say anything more during the city’s October work session about the matter other than it was what she heard, and that she worried about the security of the city’s computer systems if that were the case.

“All I’m saying is it not only a liability for the city, but for the individual person,” she said.

Baldwin – who admitted that he and the city’s contracted IT services are the only ones with full access to Aragon’s network – did not comment further about the use, but when concerns were raised about the potential for social engineering to get passwords that have potentially gone unchanged or for the opportunity for malware to get into a system, he said “the IT company would handle that.”

Seiz’s concern was that if passwords are being shared by employees with coworkers even for convenience purposes, it increases the liability on that employee for any actions taken digitally that might not be under their control.

Her example pointed toward the potential for a shared password to be used to login and send an e-mail or make downloads that would violate Aragon’s employee policies. Though in that scenario it could be proven through several ways of an employee’s innocence, what can’t be proven is who would actually be at fault.

During her explanation of why it was a bad idea for employees to share login information with one another, staff did point out that during times of emergency – say when the city’s court ticket software locks out a user during the middle of a session when people are trying to pay traffic violations -- it is difficult to justify that policy.

Seiz said she did understand those concerns, but held firm on her position.

“When it comes down to a breach of information, I’d personally be unwilling to lose my job and go to jail,” Seiz said.