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Comment by illys | Hacker News Reader

"Their security seems fairly top-notch"

That sounds optimistic: a mass-leak would be a major company issue touching its credibility, with a possible black-out if the hackers do not make it public. Think of Yahoo: how many years to admit a massive leak?

In addition, who can be sure there are no DBA leaving with data on USB keys?

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This is an easy thing to confirm, and I guarantee you that nobody with physical access to machines also has access to any data ON those machines, nor can anybody simply copy over some data to a usb stick and walk out with it. We have a highly complex system with very strict security protocols, and the mere act of inserting a usb into a server in production would not only fail to work, but it would set off alarm bells like you wouldn't believe.

I used to work in a vaulted research lab where any use of the USB ports on your machine and/or using a non-virus scanned CD would leave an alert to be audited by the security office. This wasn't even secret data, just in proximity of machines that might have contained some but policies are org-wide. This anecdote isn't really Google related, but just to say that big enterprises are tracking in ways you might not think about every day.

> In addition, who can be sure there are no DBA leaving with data on USB keys?

Any large org has measures the prevent that sort of thing, including Google.

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