Doppelganger Promotes Incident Hiding: Why Saying Something When You See Something Is So Important
KnowBe4, Monday, October 27th, 2025
This story happened a decade ago, when I was working at a Fortune 10 company. 'Smartest' is subjective, but most of my former coworkers and external customers agreed the guy involved in this story was seen as the 'smartest' guy around.
One day, while preparing to watch the Super Bowl, he received an email from an employee of another company with whom he was working on a major joint project. The email said that the other employee had found a document related to the project they were working on and that he should read it. As he opened the document, he saw a quick command prompt box open up and close, almost too fast to really notice.
He was also surprised to see the document had nothing to do with the project they were working on. As he closed the document, he wondered why the other project team member had sent it. 'Oh, well.', he thought. He had more important things to do as the Super Bowl was starting.