this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mozilla products banned by IT because they had a vulnerability in a pervious version.

RantIt 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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

To collect numbers, which they sell in bulk, to shadey organizations, that might SIM Jack you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's not about security, it's about liability. You can't sue OSS to get shareholders off your back.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For our org, we are required to do this for our cybersecurity insurance plan

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tell them NIST now recommends against it so the insurance company is increasing your risks

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.