Leave your screen unlocked, meet developers paypal.com
An essay reflecting on the effectiveness of 'social' security training at PayPal, where employees were pranked for leaving workstations unlocked. The author argues that immediate, peer-driven feedback is more effective than modern, abstract compliance training.
Why it matters
Challenges the efficacy of modern corporate cybersecurity training and suggests that cultural norms and immediate consequences are better deterrents than automated compliance.
How this was written: drafted with an AI assistant from my own notes, then edited by me.
Somebody dropped a post in one of those IT humor groups - this one - and the comments turned into a wall of 90s office war stories. Some of them were genuinely funny. Not meme-funny. Funny like you were there and your stomach dropped a little because you remembered doing it.
So here's mine, and then the argument underneath it, because I think we threw out something useful when we cleaned all this up.
The rule at PayPal was simple and unwritten. Walk away from your desk at lunch without locking your workstation, and by the time you got back, an email had gone out from your account to developers@paypal.com . Every engineer in the building. From you. About whatever your colleagues decided you felt strongly about that day.
Get smarter about the news
Sign up free for a feed built around what you actually care about, Dive Deeper research on any story, and the full text of every article.
Create free accountAlready have an account? Sign in