Am I reading this right, there are interns and engineers running PHP in a debugger on production data? How else would he be able to memorialize his own account and trigger the email?
That is a good point, how did no-one else pick up on that???! It reminds me of engineers where I used to work, who would run through a £0.01 transaction on their credit card to check the changes to the charging system were still working...
I've seen talks with engineers that say this is this case. I think the one in particular was from @Scale. They've had the occasional issue with an intern dropping a table in production, but they said they haven't really run into issues with granting access to production data.