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] 10 points 1 year ago (2 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] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If you feel like poking a bear. NIST 800-63B is the US Federal guidance on passwords. In the past this guidance said to have long passwords and rotate them. Now they say 8 characters and never change (along with using MFA).

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I dunno, gluing usb's in a super sensitive environment like that is actually logical; on the disc drives - they could disable autoplay as well though removing or gluing them closed would be preferable. USB is just such an easy attack vector where the individual plugging it in may not have skills themselves - it might be easier to bribe cleaning folks for example - or inject a person into a cleaning team. Ideally they would attack multiple nodes of your target's network via as many avenues as possible; which makes the network and vpn thing just silly indeed; perhaps they were waiting for someone to try something with excellent infosec / firewalls / traffic shaping. yeeeeah lol.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So like.. Unplug the mouse and plug in the thumb drive... Bam!

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm sure there are more elegant ways they could have disabled the USB ports, but this might have been partially to avoid users being able to accidentally compromise their device by sticking a thumb drive they found in the parking lot in to see what was on it. For exfiltration and VPN usage over the network there are other controls they can/likely had put in place that you may just not have known about

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

They were just paranoid dopes.

I would hear them talking about IT security the way 10 year old boys talk about defending their fort from zombies.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So… what was the zombie situation tho? Were they at least on top of that?

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