One chestnut from my history in lottery game development:
While our security staff was incredibly tight and did a generally good job, oftentimes levels of paranoia were off the charts.
Once they went around hot gluing shut all of the “unnecessary” USB ports in our PCs under the premise of mitigating data theft via thumb drive, while ignoring that we were all Internet-connected and VPNs are a thing, also that every machine had a RW optical drive.
Over 150 Major Incidents in a single month.
Formerly, I was on the Major Incident Response team for a national insurance company. IT Security has always been in their own ivory tower in every company I’ve worked for. But this company IT Security department was about the worst case I’ve ever seen up until that time and since.
They refused to file changes, or discuss any type of change control with the rest of IT. I get that Change Management is a bitch for the most of IT, but if you want to avoid major outages, file a fucking Change record and follow the approval process. The security directors would get some hair brained idea in a meeting in the morning and assign one of their barely competent techs to implement it that afternoon. They’d bring down what ever system they were fucking with. Then my team had to spend hours, usually after business hours, figuring out why a system, which had not seen a change control in two weeks, suddenly stopped working. Would security send someone to the MI meeting? Of course not. What would happen is, we would call the IT Security response team and ask if anything changed on their end. Suddenly 20 minutes later everything was back up and running. With the MI team not doing anything. We would try to talk to security and ask what they changed. They answered “nothing” every god damn time.
They got their asses handed to them when they brought down a billing system which brought in over $10 Billion (yes with a “B”) a year and people could not pay their bills. That outage went straight to the CIO and even the CEO sat in on that call. All of the sudden there was a hard change freeze for a month and security was required to file changes in the common IT record system, which was ServiceNow at the time.
We went from 150 major outages (defined as having financial, or reputation impact to the company) in a single month to 4 or 5.
Fuck IT Security. It’s a very important part of of every IT Department, but it is almost always filled with the most narcissistic incompetent asshats of the entire industry.
Jesus Christ I never thought id be happy to have a change control process
Lots of safety measures really suck. But they generally get implemented because the alternative is far worse.
At my current company all changes have to happen via GitHub PR and commit because we use GitOps (ex: ArgoCD with Kubernetes). Any changes you do manually are immediately overwritten when ArgoCD notices the config drift.
This makes development more annoying sometimes but I’m so damn glad when I can immediately look at GitHub for an audit trail and source of truth.
It wasn’t InfoSec in this case but I had an annoying tech lead that would merge to main without telling people, so anytime something broke I had his GitHub activity bookmarked and could rule that out first.
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Nah mate, they were completely right. What if you install an older version, and keep using it maliciously? Oh wait, now that you mention, I’m totally sure Edge had a similar problem at one point in the past. So refrain from using Edge, too. Or Explorer. And while we’re at it, it’s best to stay away from Chrome, as well. That had a similar vulnerability before, I’m sure. So let’s dish that, along with Opera, Safari, Maxthon and Netscape Navigator. Just use Lynx, it’s super lightweight!
EDIT: on another thought, you should just have stopped working for the above reason. Nothing is safe anymore.
Can’t use Lynx either.
https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2010-2810/
All web pages must now be phoned in via a touch-tone system, and delivered on paper printouts via regular post.
Locked down our USB ports. We work on network equipment that we have to use the USB port to log in to locally.
Often times you’ll find that the crazy things IT does are forced on them from higher ups that don’t know shit.
A common case of this is requiring password changes every x days, which is a practice that is known to actively make passwords worse.
That’s super true, so many times to stay ISO compliant (I’m thinking about the lottery industry here), security policies need to align with other recommendations and best practices that are often insane.
But then there’s a difference between those things which at least we can rationalize WHY they exist… and then there’s gluing USB plugs shut because they read about it on slashdot and had a big paranoia. Lol
I’m in IT security and I’m fighting this battle. I want to lessen the burden of passwords and arbitrary rotation is terrible.
I’ve ran into a number of issues at my company that would give me the approval to reduce the frequency of expired passwords
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the company gets asked this question by other customers “do you have a password policy for your staff?” (that somehow includes an expiration frequency).
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on-prem AD password complexity has some nice parts built in vs some terrible parts with no granularity. It’s a single check box in gpo that does way too much stuff. I’m also not going to write a custom password policy because I don’t have the skill set to do it correctly when we’re talking about AD, that’s nightmare inducing. (Looking at specops to help and already using Azure AD password protection in passive mode)
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I think management is worried that a phishing event happens on a person with a static password and then unfairly conflating that to my argument of “can we just do two things: increase password length by 2 and decrease expiration frequency by 30 days”
At the end of the day, some of us in IT security want to do the right things based in common sense but we get stymied by management decisions and precedence. Hell, I’ve brought NIST 800-63B documentation with me to check every reason why they wouldn’t budge. It’s just ingrained in them - meanwhile you look at the number of tickets for password help and password sharing violations that get reported … /Sigh
I feel this. I increased complexity and length, and reduced change frequency to 120d. It worked really well with the staggered rollout. Shared passwords went down significantly, password tickets went to almost none (there’s always that ‘one’). Everything points to this being the right thing and the fact that NIST supports this was a win… until the the IT audit. The auditor wrote “the password policy changed from 8-length, moderate complexity, 90-day change frequency to 12-length, high complexity, 120-day change frequency” and the board went apeshit. It wasn’t an infraction or a “ding”, it was only a note. The written policy was, of course, changed to match the GPO, so the note was for the next auditor to know of the change. The auditor even mentioned how he was impressed with the modernity of our policy and how it should lead to a better posture. I was forced to change it back, even though I got buyin from CTO for the change. BS.
At the end of the day, some of us in IT security want to do the right things based in common sense but we get stymied by management decisions and precedence. Hell, I’ve brought NIST 800-63B documentation with me to check every reason why they wouldn’t budge. It’s just ingrained in them - meanwhile you look at the number of tickets for password help and password sharing violations that get reported …
Paint the picture for management:
At one time surgery was the purview of medieval barbers. Yes, the same barbers that cut your hair. At the time there were procedures to intentionally cause people to bleed excessively and cutting holes the body to let the one of the “4 humors” out to make the patient well again. All of this humanity arrived at with tens of thousands of years of existence on Earth. Today we look at this as uninformed and barbaric. Yet we’re doing the IT Security equivalent of those medieval barber still today. We’re bleeding our users unnecessarily with complex frequent password rotation and other bad methods because that’s what was the standard at one time. What’s the modern medicine version of IT Security? NIST 800-63B is a good start. I’m happy to explain whats in there. Now, do we want to keep harming our users and wasting the company’s money on poor efficiency or do we want to embrace the lesson learned from that bad past?
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Or it prompts people to just stick their “super secure password” with byzantine special character, numeral, and capital letter requirements to their monitor or under their keyboard, because they can’t be arsed to remember what nonsensical piece of shit they had to come up with this month just to make the damn machine happy and allow them to do their jobs.
I do this in protest of asinine password change rules.
Nobody’s gonna see it since my monitor is at home, but it’s the principle of the thing.
A truly dedicated enough attacker can and will look in your window! Or do fancier things like enable cameras on devices you put near your monitor
Not saying it’s likely, but writing passwords down is super unsafe
What you are describing is the equivalent of somebody breaking into your house so they can steal your house key.
No, they’re breaking into your house to steal your work key. The LastPass breach was accomplished by hitting an employee’s personal, out of date, Plex server and then using it to compromise their work from home computer. Targeting a highly privileged employees personal technology is absolutely something threat actors do.
The point is if they’re going to get access to your PC it’s not going to be to turn on a webcam to see a sticky note on your monitor bezel. They’re gonna do other nefarious shit or keylog, etc.
For our org, we are required to do this for our cybersecurity insurance plan
Tell them NIST now recommends against it so the insurance company is increasing your risks
The guideline is abundantly clear too with little room for interpretation:
5.1.1.1 Memorized Secret Authenticators
Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.
The DOD was like this. And it wasn’t just that you had to change passwords every so often but the requirements for those passwords were egregious but at the same time changing 1 number or letter was enough to pass the password requirements.
Removed admin access for all developers without warning and without a means for us to install software. We got access back in the form of a secondary admin account a few days later, it was just annoying until then.
I had the same problem once. Every time I needed to be an admin, I had to send an email to an outsourced guy in another country, and wait one hour for an answer with a temporary password.
With WSL and Linux, I needed to be admin 3 or 4 times per day. I CCed my boss for every request. When he saw that I was waiting and doing nothing for 4 hours every day, he sent them an angry email and I got my admin account back.
The stupid restriction was meant for managers and sales people who didn’t need an admin account. It was annoying for developers.
I had to run experiments that generate a lot of data (think hundreds of megabytes per minute). Our laptops had very little internal storage. I wasn’t allowed to use an external drive, or my own NAS, or the company share - instead they said “can’t you just delete the older experiments?”… Sure, why would I need the experiment data I’m generating? Might as well /dev/null it!
They set zscaler so that if I don’t access an internal service for an unknown number of months, it means I don’t need it “for my daily work”, so they block it. If I want to access it again I need to open a ticket. There is no way to know what they closed and when they’ll close something.
In 1 months since this policy is active, I already have opened tickets to access test databases, k8s control plane, quality control dashboards, tableau server…
I really cannot comment how wrong it is.
Zscaler is one of the worst products I’ve had the displeasure to interact with. They implemented it at my old job and it said that my home Internet connection was insecure to connect to the VPN. Cyber Sec guys couldn’t figure out the issue because the logs were SO helpful.
Took working with their support to find that it has somehow identified my nonstandard address spacing on my LAN to be insecure for some reason.
I kept my work laptop on a separate vlan for obvious reasons.
Hasn’t made life hell, but the general dumb following of compliance has left me baffled:
- users must not be able to have a crontab. Crontab for users disabled.
- compliance says nothing about systemd timers, so these work just fine 🤦
I’ve raised it with security and they just shrugged it off. Wankers.
Took away Admin rights, so everytime you wanted to install something or do something in general that requires higher privileges, we had to file a ticket in the helpdesk to get 10 minutes of Admin rights.
The review of your request took sometimes up 3 days. Fun times for a software developer.
3 days? That’s downright speedy!
I submitted a ticket that fell into a black hole. I have long since found an alternate solution, but am now keeping the ticket open for the sick fascination of seeing how long it takes to get a response. 47 days and counting…
We worked around this at my old job by getting VirtualBox installed on our PCs and just running CentOS or Ubuntu VMs to develop in. Developing on windows sucks unless you’re doing .NET imo.
Developing on VMs also sucks, neverending network issues on platforms like Windows which have a shitty networking stack (try forwarding ports or using VPN connections).
In fact, Windows is just a shitty dev platform in general for non-Microsoft technologies but I get that you needed to go for the least shit option
Yeah fortunately we didn’t need to do any port forwarding or anything complex for networking for developing locally. It was definitely much easier for us. I don’t like Apple, but I didn’t mind my other old job that gave us MacBooks honestly.
One IT security team insisted we have separate source code repositories for production and development environments.
I’m honestly not sure how they thought that would work.
I’m honestly not sure how they thought that would work.
Just manually copy-paste everything. That never goes wrong, right?
That’s fucking bananas.
In my job, the only difference between prod/dev is a single environmental file. Two repositories would literally serve no purpose and if anything, double the chances of having the source code be stolen.
Our IT mandated 15 character long passwords. Many people in manufacturing (the guys who make the stuff we produce or setup and fix the machines) have the passwords in the format: “Somename123456…” You get the picture. When the passwords are forced to change? Yeah, just add “a,b,c,d…” at the end. Many have it written down on some post-it note on the notebook or desk. Security my ass.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I found that office guys have it too.
At a place I used to work one of my coworkers just had their password as a barcode taped to their desk. Now to be fair we worked in the extra high security room so even getting access to that desk would be a little tricky and we had about 20 unlabeled barcoded taped to each of our desks for various inventory locations and functions. So if someone wanted to get into their account they would still have to guess which barcode it was and get into a room only like 10 people had access to. It still felt pretty damn sketchy though.
Banned open source software because of security concerns. For password management they require LastPass or that we write them down in a book that we keep on ourselves at all times. Worth noting that this policy change was a few months ago. After the giant breach.
And for extra absurdity: MFA via SMS only.
I wish I was making this up.
Care to elaborate “MFA via SMS only”? I’m not in tech and know MFA through text is widely used. Or do you mean alternatives like Microsoft Authenticator or YubiKey? Thanks!
Through a low tech social engineering attack referred to as SIM Jacking, an attacker can have your number moved to their SIM card, redirecting all SMS 2FA codes effectively making the whole thing useless as a security measure. Despite this, companies still implement it out of both laziness and to collect phone numbers (which is often why SMS MFA is forced)
To collect numbers, which they sell in bulk, to shadey organizations, that might SIM Jack you.
Banning open source because of security concerns is the opposite of what they should be doing if they care about security. You can’t vet proprietary software.
It’s not about security, it’s about liability. You can’t sue OSS to get shareholders off your back.
I am not allowed to change my wallpaper.
This came from your security team? I usually see it from HR / management selling it as a branding issue or “professional” thing.
Oh man. Huge company I used to work for had:
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two separate Okta instances. It was a coin toss as to which one you’d need for any given service
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oh, and a third internally developed federated login service for other stuff
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90 day expiry for all of the above passwords
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two different corporate IM systems, again coin toss depending on what team you’re working with
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nannyware everywhere. Open Performance Monitor and watch network activity spike anytime you move your mouse or hit a key
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an internally developed secure document system used by an international division that we were instructed to never ever use. We were told by IT that it “does something to the PC at a hardware level if you install the reader and open a document” which would cause a PC to be banned from the network until we get it replaced. Sounds hyperbolic, but plausible given the rest of the mess.
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required a mobile authenticator app for some of the above services, yet the company expected that us grunts use our personal devices for this purpose.
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all of the above and more, yet we were encouraged to use any cloud hosted password manager of our choosing.
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Here in Portugal the IT guys at the National Health Service recently blocked access to the Medical Doctor’s Union website from inside the national health service intranet.
The doctors are currently refusing to work any more overtime than the annual mandatory maximum of 150h so there are all sorts of problems in the national health service at the moment, mainly with hospitals having to close down emergency services to walk-in patients (this being AskLemmy, I’ll refrain from diving into the politics of it) so the whole things smells of something more than a mere mistake.
Anyways, this has got to be one of the dumbest abuses of firewalling “dangerous” websites I’ve seen in a long while.
