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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[–] Merwyn 21 points 10 months ago (2 children)

They forbid us to add our ssh keys in some server machines, and force us to log in these servers with the non-personal admin account, with a password that is super easy to guess and haven't been changed in 5 years.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago

Access to change production systems was limited to a single team, which was tasked with doing all deploys by hand, for an engineering organisation of 50+ people. Quickly becoming overloaded, they limited deploy frequency to five deploys per day, organisation-wide.

Bit of a shit-show, that one.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Disabled "unnecessary" services on all member servers including netlogon. That was a fun couple of weeks.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The "we'll just disable everything until somebody complains" strategy. Idiots!

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The IT company I work for purchased me, along with some number of my coworkers and our product line from my former employer. Leading up to the cut over, we’re told that on midnight of the change, our company email will stop working. No forwarders or anything. BUT, we will get a new email that consists of [email protected]. When the password on this new account expires, because we can’t change it because we’re no longer employees, we have to go to a website to request a password change. This emails us a link to our new company email address, but we can’t use that link. We have to manually change part of the URL for it to work. I had them manually change my password twice before I gave up on the whole process. Figured I didn’t work for them anymore. What would they do if I stopped using this bogus account/email address, fire me?

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[–] _haha_oh_wow_ 19 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

I used to work with a guy who glued the USB ports shut on his labs. I asked him why he didn't just turn them off in BIOS and then lock BIOS behind a password and he just kinda shrugged. He wasn't security, but it's kinda related to your story.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Security where I work is pretty decent really, I don't recall them ever doing any dumb crazy stuff. There were some things that were unpopular with some people but they had good reasons that far outweighed any complaints.

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[–] csm10495 18 points 10 months ago (4 children)

In high school they blocked dictionary.com for some reason.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

SSL proxy, in a company full of developers, so they could sniff traffic. It broke everything. It's one of the reasons I left that company.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I got to say after reading a couple stories here I can understand the frustrations and some very legitimate stories here make a lot of sense in the context of it teams fucking up. but I also think there's a lot of ignorance about what people are actually trying to accomplish in some of these stories as somebody that does it security and a lot of compliance work sometimes we're doing these things because we have to not so much that we want to.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Doesn't matter to the end user whose fault it is. The spirit of this discussion is what was done to make your life harder. If you want to, go ahead and read it as "IT workers, what stupid things were you mandated to do that made your workers jobs harder?" The end user doesn't know why a thing happens, just that IT did it. They'll complain to IT and if it's not their fault, it's their responsibility to push back on whoever is calling these shots. The idiot in charge won't know any better unless he's called out on his bullshit.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Very short screensaver timeouts, useless proxy, short timeouts from intranet pages, disabled browser extensions, to make impossible to automatize our very repetitive work, daily DB access requests for work, etc.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Mine refuses to use ipmi. Also all switches use the same password.

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