You get pressured to give the researcher superuser rights because they 'need to do things' A few days later:

"I accidentally did chmod -R 777 / to the system....and now I think I need to get on to the root user to reverse this....Can you send me the credentials for that? Or do you have a quick fix for it?"

Er, no mate. You're fucked. And LOL at the idea there is some sort of super-root that can magically fix it.