They set zscaler so that if I don’t access an internal service for an unknown number of months, it means I don’t need it “for my daily work”, so they block it. If I want to access it again I need to open a ticket. There is no way to know what they closed and when they’ll close something.
In 1 months since this policy is active, I already have opened tickets to access test databases, k8s control plane, quality control dashboards, tableau server…
Zscaler is one of the worst products I’ve had the displeasure to interact with. They implemented it at my old job and it said that my home Internet connection was insecure to connect to the VPN. Cyber Sec guys couldn’t figure out the issue because the logs were SO helpful.
Took working with their support to find that it has somehow identified my nonstandard address spacing on my LAN to be insecure for some reason.
I kept my work laptop on a separate vlan for obvious reasons.
Pretty sure it’s some misapplied heuristics for previously identified bad clients, but that should only trigger an alert (with details!) in most cases and not block you if it’s not also paired with any known malicious activity
I’m going off memory from early 2021. But it was my private IP on the laptop using a Class B private address according to their support team. I was flabbergasted. Maybe they just expected every remote worker to use Class C or something. Who knows?
Endless approval processes are a good one. They don’t even have to be nonsensical. Just unnecessarily manual, tedious, applied to the simplest changes, with long wait times and multiple steps. Add time zone differences and pile up many different ones, and life becomes hell.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Yup. My first console technically was a NES (technically Atari 2600 but I was really young). Been playing console and PC games ever since. I used to love games. Wanted to design them and even got a job as a game tester and GM for WoW (tester made me realize I didn’t want to work in the industry). I don’t know when it started but outside of a few instances I can’t get into games anymore. I think there are a few reasons (though they’re sort of overlapping).
I’ve already experienced a lot of it. I’ve saved countless kingdoms, stop hundreds of bad guys from blowing up stuff, repeatedly discovered the mysteries of crystals/labs/villages. There isn’t a lot of “new” stuff.
I don’t have consistent chunks of free time and don’t want to use all my freetime playing games. I can’t always invest in a long story and a lot of games take a while to get started.
As I get older I value my time more. I’m not necessarily old but looking at life expectancy I’ve hit the midway point. That just causes me to evaluate my freetime differently. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean I am necessarily making the best of use of my time but stops me from spending 8 hours of a Saturday playing the new Spider-Man.
I find my need to unwind and relax increases with age. After a long stressful day at work I don’t necessarily want to engage with complex systems or drawn out stories. I just want to start playing and not have to think. I also don’t want to be stressed. I find online competitive games to be stressful.
There are other issues like the market has changed and less games align with what I enjoy. Social aspect of games are mostly gone for me.
I’m happy enough to spend time and energy and get into new games. The difference is my standards are WAY higher than when I was younger. I’ve played so many games that it’s hard to impress.
I actually think they’re new school enough where Linux to them means a lot less than it does to us. And so they don’t feel at home on a Linux machine and, unfortunately, don’t care to learn.
I could totally be wrong, though. Maybe I’m the moron.
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.
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!
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.
I submitted a ticket that fell into a black hole. I have long since found an alternate solution, but am now keeping the ticket open for the sick fascination of seeing how long it takes to get a response. 47 days and counting…
Any ticketing system set up like that is just begging for abuse. If they don’t have queue managers then the team should share the hit if they just leave the ticket untouched
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.
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
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.
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.
No, they’re breaking into your house to steal your work key. The LastPass breach was accomplished by hitting an employee’s personal, out of date, Plex server and then using it to compromise their work from home computer. Targeting a highly privileged employees personal technology is absolutely something threat actors do.
The point is if they’re going to get access to your PC it’s not going to be to turn on a webcam to see a sticky note on your monitor bezel. They’re gonna do other nefarious shit or keylog, etc.
Again, how is the attacker going to see a piece of paper that is stuck to the side of the screen? This rule makes sense in high traffic areas, but in a private persons home? The attacker would also need to be a burglar.
It seems that some people are having trouble following the conversation and a basic stream of topical logic.
The initial premise was that somebody could see your passwords by pwning your machine… And using that to… Turn on webcam so they could steal your password so they could… pwn your machine?
Nope. The premise is they pwn ANOTHER, less secure, personal device and use the camera from the DIFFERENT device to pwn your work computer. For example, by silently installing Pegasus on some cocky “security is dumb lol” employee’s 5 year out-of-date iphone via text message while they’re sleeping, and use the camera from that phone to recon the password.
They probably wouldn’t want the $3.50 that person has in their bank account, but ransoming corporate data pays bank, and wire transfering from a corporate account pays even better! If you’re in a highly privileged position, or have access to execute financial transactions at a larger company, pwning a personal device isn’t outside of the threat model.
Most likely that threat model doesn’t apply to you, but perhaps at least put it under the keyboard out of plain sight?
I made one comment to you clarifying the other person’s point because you clearly didn’t understand what they were saying. Personally seen a couple of small companies fold because they were ransomed from a password on a post it. But you do you.
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.
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.
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.
No never minded people that think that all passwords are being cracked tell me I’m wrong. Lists emails and passwords grabbed from fishing attacks tell me the people that are too lazy to change their passwords and once in awhile don’t deserve the security.
I’m a native English speaker. I can’t understand your comment. I sense that you have a useful perspective, could you rephrase it so it’s understandable?
Even better is forcing changes every 30 or 60 days, and not allowing changes more than every week. Our users complain daily between those rules and the password requirements that they are too dumb to understand.
I’m aware. Apparently everyone who read my post has misread it. I’m saying that the requirements above are terrible, and they make my users complain constantly. Our security team constantly comes up with ways to increase security theater at the detriment of actual security.
And in my company the password change policies are very different from one system to another. Some force a change monthly, some every 28 days, some every 90 days, and thwn there is rhat one legacy system that no longer has a functioning password change mechanism, so we can’t change passwords there if we wanted to.
And the different systems all want different password formats, have different re-use rules.
And, with all those uncoordinated passwords, they don’t allow password managers to be used on corporate machines, despite the training materials that the company makes us re-do every year recommending password managers…
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.
I’m in IT security and I’m fighting this battle. I want to lessen the burden of passwords and arbitrary rotation is terrible.
I’ve ran into a number of issues at my company that would give me the approval to reduce the frequency of expired passwords
the company gets asked this question by other customers “do you have a password policy for your staff?” (that somehow includes an expiration frequency).
on-prem AD password complexity has some nice parts built in vs some terrible parts with no granularity. It’s a single check box in gpo that does way too much stuff. I’m also not going to write a custom password policy because I don’t have the skill set to do it correctly when we’re talking about AD, that’s nightmare inducing. (Looking at specops to help and already using Azure AD password protection in passive mode)
I think management is worried that a phishing event happens on a person with a static password and then unfairly conflating that to my argument of “can we just do two things: increase password length by 2 and decrease expiration frequency by 30 days”
At the end of the day, some of us in IT security want to do the right things based in common sense but we get stymied by management decisions and precedence. Hell, I’ve brought NIST 800-63B documentation with me to check every reason why they wouldn’t budge. It’s just ingrained in them - meanwhile you look at the number of tickets for password help and password sharing violations that get reported … /Sigh
I feel this. I increased complexity and length, and reduced change frequency to 120d. It worked really well with the staggered rollout. Shared passwords went down significantly, password tickets went to almost none (there’s always that ‘one’). Everything points to this being the right thing and the fact that NIST supports this was a win… until the the IT audit. The auditor wrote “the password policy changed from 8-length, moderate complexity, 90-day change frequency to 12-length, high complexity, 120-day change frequency” and the board went apeshit. It wasn’t an infraction or a “ding”, it was only a note. The written policy was, of course, changed to match the GPO, so the note was for the next auditor to know of the change. The auditor even mentioned how he was impressed with the modernity of our policy and how it should lead to a better posture. I was forced to change it back, even though I got buyin from CTO for the change. BS.
At the end of the day, some of us in IT security want to do the right things based in common sense but we get stymied by management decisions and precedence. Hell, I’ve brought NIST 800-63B documentation with me to check every reason why they wouldn’t budge. It’s just ingrained in them - meanwhile you look at the number of tickets for password help and password sharing violations that get reported …
Paint the picture for management:
At one time surgery was the purview of medieval barbers. Yes, the same barbers that cut your hair. At the time there were procedures to intentionally cause people to bleed excessively and cutting holes the body to let the one of the “4 humors” out to make the patient well again. All of this humanity arrived at with tens of thousands of years of existence on Earth. Today we look at this as uninformed and barbaric. Yet we’re doing the IT Security equivalent of those medieval barber still today. We’re bleeding our users unnecessarily with complex frequent password rotation and other bad methods because that’s what was the standard at one time. What’s the modern medicine version of IT Security? NIST 800-63B is a good start. I’m happy to explain whats in there. Now, do we want to keep harming our users and wasting the company’s money on poor efficiency or do we want to embrace the lesson learned from that bad past?
At Telegram channels. Subscribe to the top channels for both and then use your own discretion. Note: You need to use translate tool in Telegram as they use local languages.
If you need some hints for the name of the channels (the ones I sub to):
For the Israeli: search for kod[twice]group about 148k subscribers.
For Gaza: search for G××× Now. about 1.5M subscribers.
Need to be careful. There are some fake channels having similar names to those. So you need to double check the number of subscriptions.
I’ve been through a bunch of life phases and gaming has basically been a part of all of them. Definitely, over time, the thrill of a new game is a bit more subdued than when you were a kid because you have done it so many times, and I’ll admit, if a game doesn’t immediately grab me, I probably will bounce off it. I have a ton of games that I still play from gen 2-6 if I need to feel nostalgic. But I realized that I have trouble committing to games that feel too samey as the most recent ones I’ve played. If I play a JRPG, I have to follow that up with a platformer, followed by an indie game, followed by a Sony 3rd person shooter. Fighting games are also great pallet cleansers. Sounds like you’re depressed, and you should really spend time in nature and remember what and how you found joy in the past with gaming.
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