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.
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.
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.
Do you work for a government?
I tried so hard to steer my last company away from SMS MFA. CTO basically flat out said, “As long as I’m here SMS MFA will always be an option.”
Alright, smarmy dumbass. I dream of the day when they get breached because of SMS.
If I remember it correctly, in GSM it’s perfectly possibly to spoof a phone number to receive the SMS using the roaming part of the protocol.
The thing was designed to be decently safe, not to be highly secure.
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)
TIL! thanks for the explanation.
To collect numbers, which they sell in bulk, to shadey organizations, that might SIM Jack you.
Sim swap is quite easy if you are convincing enough for support at an ISP doing phone plans.
Now imagine if I sim-swapped your 2FA codes :)Exactly this. Instead you should use a phone app like Aegis or proprietary solutions like MS Authenticator to MFA your access because it’s encrypted.
Thenks! I really don’t want to be forced into an app, but it’s good to know the reason why.
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.
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.
Oh shit, you just reminded me of the time that I had to PHONE Macromedia to manually activate software because of the firewalling. This was after waiting days to get administrative permission to install it in the first place.
“Thank you” for helping resurface those horrible memories!
I don’t miss those days.
I too know this pain
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We used Intune Portal for a list of approved desktop apps
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.
You can also lock down the repo to require approvals before merge into main branch to avoid this.
Since we were on the platform team we were all GitHub admins 😩. So it all relied on trust. Is there a way to block even admins?
Hm can’t say. I’m using bitbucket and it does block admins, though they all have the ability to go into settings and remove the approval requirement. No one does though because then the bad devs would be able to get changes in without reviews.
That sounds like a good idea. I’ll take another look at GitHub settings. Thanks!
The past several years I have been working more as a process engineer than a technical one. I’ve worked in Problem Management, Change Management, and currently in Incident for a major defense contractor (yes, you’ve heard of it). So I’ve been on both sides. Documenting an incident is a PITA. File a Change record to restart a server that is in an otherwise healthy cluster? You’re kidding, right? What the hell is a “Problem” record and why do I need to mess with it?
All things I’ve heard and even thought over the years. What it comes down to, the difference between a Mom and Pop operation, that has limited scalability and a full Enterprise Environment that can support a multi-billion dollar business… Is documentation. That’s what those numb nuts in that Insurance Company were too stupid to understand.
You poor man. I’ve worked with those exact fukkin’ bozos.
Lack of a Change Control process has nothing to do with IT Security except within the domain of Availability. Part of Security is ensuring IT systems are available and working.
You simply experienced working at an organization with poor enforcement of Change Control policies. That was a mistake of oversight, because with competent oversight anyone causing outages by making unapproved changes that cause an outage would be reprimanded and instructed to follow policy properly.
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.
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.
That was the only difference for us as well. The CI/CD process built container images. Only difference between dev, test, and prod was the environment variables passed to the container.
At first I asked the clueless security analyst to explain how that improves security, which he couldn’t. Then I asked him how testing against one repository and deploying from another wouldn’t invalidate the results of the testing done by the QA team, but he kept insisting we needed it to check some box. I asked about the source of the policy and still no explanation, at least not one that made any sense.
Security analyst escalated it to his (thankfully not clueless) boss who promptly gave our process a pass and pointed out to Mr security analyst that literally nobody does that.
I’m honestly not sure how they thought that would work.
Just manually copy-paste everything. That never goes wrong, right?
I mean, it’s what the Security guys do, right? Just copy+paste everything, mandate that everyone else does it too, Management won’t argue because it’s for “security” reasons.
Then the Security guys will sit around jerking each other off about how much more secure they made the system
Could work if dev was upstream from prod. But honestly there would be no difference between that and branches.
Maybe it is a rights issue. Preventing a prod build agent of sorts to access develop code.
Yeah…assuming that the policy was written “from blood” (meaning someone did something stupid).
But even then you can put other checks and balances in place to make sure that kind of thing doesn’t happen.
This is such an extreme reaction though. Or the policy was made from someone dumb
Yep doing that now. Not sustainable in the slightest. Im glad im not in charge of that system.
Not my IT department (I am my IT department): One of the manufacturers for a brand of equipment we sell has a “Dealer Resource Center,” which consists solely of a web page where you can download the official product photography and user’s manuals, etc. for their products. This is to enable you to list their products on your e-commerce web site, or whatever.
Apparently whoever they subcontracted this to got their hands on a copy of Front End Dev For Dummies, and in order to use this you must create a mandatory account with minimum password complexity requirements, and solve a CAPTCHA every time you log in. They also require you to change your password every 60 days, and if you don’t they lock your account and you have to call their tech support.
Three major problems with this:
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There is no verification check that you are actually an authorized dealer of this brand of product, so any fool who finds this on Google and comes up with an email address can just create an account and away you go downloading whatever you want. If you’ve been locked out of your account and don’t feel like picking up the telephone – no problem! Just create a new one.
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There is no personalized content on this service. Everyone sees the same content, and it’s not like there’s a way to purchase anything on here or anyway, and your “account” stores no identifying information about you or your dealership that you feel like giving it other than your email address. You are free to fill it out with a fake name if you like; no one checks. You could create an account using [email protected] and no one would notice.
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Every single scrap of content on this site is identical to the images and .pdf downloads already available on the manufacturer’s public web site. There is no privileged or secure content hosted in this “Resource Center” whatsoever. The pictures aren’t higher res or anything. Even the file names are the same. It’s obviously hooked up to the same backend as the manufacturer’s public web site. So if there were such a thing as a “bad actor” who wanted to obtain a complete library of glamor shots of durable goods, for some reason, there’s nothing stopping them from scraping the public web site and coming up with literally exactly the same thing.
It’s baffling.
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That’s three words.
That’s is only one word, dumby
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ZScaler. It’s supposedly a security tool meant to keep me from going to bad websites. The problem is that I’m a developer and the “bad website” definition is overly broad.
For example, they’ve been threatening to block PHP.Net for being malicious in some way. (They refuse to say how.) Now, I know a lot of people like to joke about PHP, but if you need to develop with it, PHP.Net is a great resource to see what function does what. They’re planning on blocking the reference part as well as the software downloads.
I’ve also been learning Spring Boot for development as it’s our standard tool. Except, I can’t build a new application. Why not? Doing so requires VSCode downloading some resources and - you guessed it - ZScaler blocks this!
They’ve “increased security” so much that I can’t do my job unless ZScaler is temporarily disabled.
Oh man our security team is trialing zscaler and netskope right now. I’ve been sitting in the meetings and it seems like it’s just cloud based global protect. GP was really solid so this worries me
It has the same problem as any kind of TLS interception/ traffic monitoring tool.
It just breaks everything and causes a lot of lost time and productivity firstly trying to configure everything to trust a new cert (plenty of apps refuse to use the system cert store) and secondly opening tickets with IT just to go to any useful site on the internet.
Thankfully, at least in my case, it’s trivial to disable so it’s the first thing I do when my computer restarts.
Security doesn’t seem to do any checks about what processes are actually running, so they think they’ve done a good job and I can continue to do my job
It’s been ages since I had to deal with the daily random road blocks of ZScaler, but I do think of it from time to time.
Then I play Since U Been Gone by Kelly Clarkson.
Admin access needed to change the clock, which was wrong. Missed a train because of that.
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!
Oh hey I was living this a few months ago!
Worked a job where I had to be a Linux admin for a variety of VMs. To access them, I needed an VPN that only worked inside the company LAN, and blocked internet access. it was a 30 day trial license on day 700somthing, so it had a max 5 simultaneous connection limit. Access was from my heavily locked down laptop. Windows 7 with 5 minutes locking Screensaver. The ssh software was an unknown brand, “ssh.exe” which only allowed one connection at a time in a 80 x 24 console window with no ability to copy and paste. This went to a bastion host, an HPUx box on an old csh shell with no write access to your home directory due to a 1.4mb disk quota per user. Only one login per user, ten login max, and the bastion host was the only way to connect to the Linux VMs. Default 5 minute logout for inactivity. No ssh keys allowed. No scripting allowed, was like typing over 9600 baud.
I quit that job. When asked why, I told them I was a Linux administrator and the job was not allowing me to administrate. I was told “a poor carpenter always blames his tools.” Yeah, fuck you.
A carpenter isn’t expected to use his tools with garbage grabbers (reachy claw things) either.
That sounds like the equivalent of asking a carpenter to build a wooden boat large enough to carry 30 people, but only giving them Fisherprice tools and foam blocks.
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Mozilla products banned by IT because they had a vulnerability in a pervious version.
Rant
It was so bullshit. I had Mozilla Firefox 115.1 installed, and Mozilla put out an advisory, like they do all the fucking time. Fujitsu made it out to be some huge huge unfixed bug the very next day in an email after the advisory was posted and the email chain basically said “yk, we should just remove all Firefox. It’s vulnerable so it must be removed.”
I wouldn’t be mad if they decided that they didn’t want to have it be a managed app or that there was something (actually) wrong with it or literally anything else than the fact that they didn’t bother actually reading either fucking advisory and decided to nuke something I use daily.
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.
Password rotation.
As a security guy - as soon as I can get federal auditors to agree, I’m getting rid of password expiration.
The main problem is they don’t audit with logic. It’s a script and a feeling. No password expiration FEELS less secure. Nevermind the literal years of data and research. Drives me nuts.
Cite NIST SP 800-63B.
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.
https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html
I’ve successfully used it to tell auditors to fuck off about password rotation in the healthcare space.
Now, to be in compliance with NIST guidelines, you do also need to require MFA. This document is what federal guidelines are based on, which is why you’re starting to see Federal gov websites require MFA for access.
Either way, I’d highly encourage everyone to give the full document a read through. Not enough people are aware of it and this revision was shockingly reasonable when it came out a year or two ago.
It’s counterintuitive. Drives people to use less secure passwords that they’re likely to reuse or to just increment; Password1, Password2, etc.
Also complex and random requirements for passwords
“your password may not start with a special character” (rage)
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.
Even worse here - we cant change the screensaver or screen lockout timeout settings!
I have a workaround by running a little looping script that keep the screen active. Its not that I particularly object to the screensaver, but once it activates I have to Ctrl Alt Delete 3-4 times and enter my password to get my desktop open again. Also it is an active screensaver that sometimes mucks up my desktop layout (I have a multiple monitor setup)
That is so annoying… when I’m working from home I just start a meeting with myself in Teams to keep the pc from autolocking.
That’s actually genius. Here’s me writing a script to just move the mouse randomly lol, starting a Teams meeting would’ve been way simpler
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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.
We cant run scripts on our work laptop because of domain policy. Thing is, I am a software developer. They also do not allow docker without some heavy approval process, nor VMs. So im just sitting here remoting into a machine for development…which is fine but the machine is super slow. Also their VPN keeps going down, so all the software developers have to reconnect periodically all at the same time.
At my prior jobs, it was all open so it was very easy to install the tools we needed or get approval fairly quickly. Its more frustrating than anything. At least they give us software development work marked months out.
I cannot remember the specifics because it’s going back almost 15 years now but at one point…crontab (edit and other various vital tools) was disabled by policy.
To get necessary processes/cleanup done at night, I used a scheduled task on a Windows PC to run a BAT that opened a macro program which opened a remote shell and “typed” the commands.
Fuuuuuuck.
I hate this stuff. When I had a more devops role I would just VM everything. Developers need their tools, here is a VM with root. Do what you want and backups run on Friday.
My dev pc isn’t allowed to be connected to the internet :D
Yep you have it the worst. Shut down the thread.
Wait, I haven’t even started talking about the fact it’s a huge unstructured legacy project using SharePoint 2016 and…
Where did everyone go?
Thought my work was bad. We at least can use VMs. I literally can’t do my job without one, Rockwell being what it is. Companies don’t like upgrading PLC software so I need to use old versions of windows occasionally to run old Rockwell stuff.
There was also a bug for a bit that would brick win11 PCs when trying to update PLC firmware, fun stuff.
Same boat. I use dedicated laptops. This is for my old Rockwell stuff, this is for my old Siemens stuff, this is my normal laptop with AD stuff, this one for Idec, and the last one for Schneider. Pretty much every laptop at the company gets retired it becomes mine.
Also works for on site access. Customer needs support? Mail them a laptop. I got one laptop that has been in Canada, both coastlines in America, Australia, and Vietnam.
I had a software developer job where they expected me to write code in Microsoft notepad, put it on a USB, and then plug it into airgapped computers to test it. Wasn’t allowed to even use notepad++.
Oh it felt so freaken good leaving that job after 6 weeks. It felt even better when I used my old manager’s personal phone number on a fake grinder profile I made. She kept a tally of my bathroom breaks.
Jump systems are a good practice but they gotta have the resources you need… I hate to say it but it sounds like y’all need to just move to a cloud platform…
