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.
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.
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
We used Intune Portal for a list of approved desktop apps
Let me guess, the list is about 6 items long with no provision for getting any added
No, it was quite extensive (20-30?) and we (I) kept expanding it. I even added icons for each app so it looked nice.
All published software was approved by Cybersecurity. We allowed people to request apps and evaluated each case.
Fighting similar shit right now. I need admin rights frequently.
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.
Set the automatic timeout for admin accounts to 15 minutes…meaning that process that may take an hour or so you have to wiggle the mouse or it logs out …not locks… logs out
From installs to copying log files, to moving data to reassigning owner of data to the service account.
And that’s why people use mouse jigglers and keep their computers unlocked 24/7.
Mine was removed by Corporate IT, along with a bunch of other open source stuff that made my life bearable.
Also I spent 5 months with our cyber security guys to try and provide a simple file replication server for my team working in a remote office with shit internet connectivity. I gave up, the spooks put up a solid defense, push all the onerous IT security compliance checking onto my desk instead of taking control.
Not as bad as my previous company though, outsourced IT support to ATOS was a nightmare.
It’s reasonably easy to make a hardware mouse wiggler with an Arduino Micro (and I don’t mean something that physically moves a mouse, rather something that looks like a USB mouse to the computer and periodically sends mouse movement messages).
If you’re desperate enough, look it up as it’s quite simple so there should be step by step instructions out there.
Absolutely love my Uno keyboard for this https://keyhive.xyz/shop/uno-single-key-keyboard
Got like 6 commands on a single key and one of them is to press shift every 30seconds so my computer doesn’t lock. Lifesaver.
Yeah, it’s surprisingly simple to get these microcontrollers to become essentially programmable keyboard/mouse emulators, by which point if you’re familiar with the stuff to program them (Arduino being the simplest and most widespread framework) it really just becomes a coding task and you can get it to do crazy stuff.
I suggested an Arduino Micro board because it bypasses the whole hardware side of the problem, but something like what you mention is even simpler.
Can also just buy one from Amazon if you’re lazy or not technically inclined.
Well, my off the cuff suggestion was what seems simple to me in this domain ;)
That said I get what you mean and agree.
That’s why you buy a jiggler that you place your mouse onto. Not detectable by IT :)
After mine was disabled, I found that if I run videos of old meetings or training onscreen, it keeps the system alive…
Works nicely when I’m WFH.
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There is no compliance item I am aware of that has that requirement, some CISO needs to learn to read.
Misunderstood STIG from the sound of it. The STIG is only applicable to unprivileged users but tends to get applied to all workstations regardless of user privileges. Also I think the .mil STIG GPOs apply it to all workstations regardless of privileges.
The other thing that tends to get overlooked is that AC-12 let’s you set it to whatever the heck you want. Ao you could theoretically set it to 99999 year by policy if you wanted.
https://www.stigviewer.com/stig/application_security_and_development/2017-01-09/finding/V-69243
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 obvioushacker@pwned.ru 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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I’m torn if I should be nodding and patting myself on the back for not doing any of this insanity or cackling and taking notes…
Taking notes?!? If you can’t make idiotic decisions on your own, you’re not much of an IT guy to begin with.
Are you twirling your mustache?
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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.
Also, zScaler breaks SSL. Every single piece of network traffic is open for them to read. Anyone who introduces zscaler should be fired and/or shot on sight. It’s garbage at best and extremely dangerous at worst.
Zscaler being the middleman is somewhat the point for security/IT teams using that feature.
And it’s a horrible point. You’re opening up your entire external network traffic to a third party, whose infrastructure isn’t even deployed or controllable in any form by you.
The idea being that it’s similar to using other enterprise solutions, many of which do the same things now.
Zscaler does have lesser settings too, at it’s most basic it can do split tunneling for internal services at an enterprise level and easy user management. Which is a huge plus.
I’d also like to point out that the entire Internet is a third party you have no control over which you open your external traffic to everyday.
The bigger deal would be the internal network, which is also a valid argument.
I’d also like to point out that the entire Internet is a third party you have no control over which you open your external traffic to everyday.
Not really. Proper TLS enables relatively secure E2E encryption, not perfect, but pretty good. Adding Zscaler means, that my entire outgoing traffic runs over one point. So one single incident in one single provider basically opens up all of my communication. And given that so many large orgs are customers of ZScaler, this company pretty much has a target on its back.
Additionally: I’m in Germany. My Company does a lot of contracting and communication with local, state and federal entities, a large part of that is not super secret, but definitely not public either. And now suddenly an Amercian company, that is legally required to hand over all data to NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. has access to (again) all of my external communication. That’s a disaster. And quite possibly pretty illegal.
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
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’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.
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.
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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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!
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)
Admin access needed to change the clock, which was wrong. Missed a train because of that.
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.
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.
