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.
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.
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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.
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
For our org, we are required to do this for our cybersecurity insurance plan
What I really love is mandatory length and character password policies so complex that together with such password change requirements that push people beyond what is humanly possible to memorize, so it all ends down written in post-its, the IT equivalent of having a spare key under a vase or the rug.
So glad we opted for a longer password length, with fewer arbitrary limits, and expiry only after 2 years or a suspected breach.
Forcing password expiration does cause people to make shittier passwords. But when their passwords are breached programitically or through social engineering They don’t just sit around valid for years on the dark web waiting for someone to buy them up.
This requirement forces people who can’t otherwise remember passwords to fall into patterns like (kid’s name)(season)(year), this is a very common password pattern for people who have to change passwords every 90 days or so. Breaching the password would expose the pattern and make it easy enough to guess based off of.
99% of password theft currently comes from phishing. Most of the people that get fished don’t have a freaking clue they got fished oh look the Microsoft site link didn’t work.
Complex passwords that never change don’t mean s*** when your users are willing to put them into a website.
It’s still not in a freaking list that they can run a programmatic attack against. People that give this answer sound like a f****** broken record I swear.
Secops has been against this method of protection for many years now, I’d say you’re the outdated one here
Years ago phishing and 2fa breaches werent as pervasive. Since we can’t all go to pass key right now, nobody’s doing a damn thing about the phishing campaigns. Secops current method of protection is to pay companies that scan the dark web by the lists and offer up if your password’s been owned for a fee.
That’s a pretty s***** tactic to try to protect your users.
We’re on the internet, you can say shit.
If your user is just using johnsmithfall2022 as their password and they update the season and year every time, it’s pretty easy for hackers to identify that pattern and correct it. This is not the solution and it actively makes life worse for everyone involved.