Well, for one thing, if you can't ensure that a given privileged person can be locked out of your systems quickly, you have a problem to fix. This should be a 1-minute operation.

Note that I don't know the details and am making assumptions that may be wrong about the case in question, but in general, if you can't deny access quickly to any given account, you really want to fix that. Not just because of rogue ex-employees - what happens when $important_person's account is compromised?

> This should be a 1-minute operation.

No. It's easy to revoke access to a user. An admin is different - an admin can install whatever he wants to give him backdoor access. Or a timebomb.

Yes, but backdoors/malware are a different question. I was talking about authorized access - LDAP, ssh keys, etc.

Detecting unauthorized software from a rogue privileged user is a different problem with very different mitigations. It is a great topic that I'm personally interested in, given that I'm implementing controls for that, but I wasn't discussing that.

Not sure how that's applicable here? Seems like an ex-admin deleting things is pretty clearly malicious...

He's saying the current admins are stupid for not investigating every possible route an ex admin could take for tanking the business.

Don't necesarrily attribute the error to the ex-admin, because the current admins were stupid enough to let it happen. Yes, the ex-admin is wrong and shouldn't have done it, but it is a crime of opportunity.

If I leave $20 on the sidewalk the thief is wrong for stealing it, but it is partially my fault for being stupid enough to leave $20 on the ground.

I'm not sure I can agree with the reasoning here. An ex-admin, who had the conviction to wipe an entire company's database, probably wouldn't have been stopped by exit procedures.

This can easily happen to anyone -

    5PM Friday - $admin and $ceo have a fight
    6PM Friday - $admin decides he's had enough with $company and $ceo, and wipes everything
    7PM Friday - $admin is fired

Where are your exit procedures now? Are the current admins stupid for not having the foresight that $admin and $ceo's fight would have resulted in the worst?

This is way more like throwing away your old roommate's belongings because they didn't change the locks when you moved out. Anyone would take a $20 bill on the ground with no way of knowing the previous owner. Not everyone would maliciously destroy someone else's property just because they had access. Yes, current admins could and should have done more to prevent this. However, this goes way beyond opportunity and firmly into malicious intent.