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.
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
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.
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:
https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html
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.
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
the company gets asked this question by other customers “do you have a password policy for your staff?” (that somehow includes an expiration frequency).
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)
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.
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?