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al177, in Tech workers - what did your IT Security team do that made your life hell and had no practical benefit?

Oh man. Huge company I used to work for had:

  • two separate Okta instances. It was a coin toss as to which one you’d need for any given service
  • oh, and a third internally developed federated login service for other stuff
  • 90 day expiry for all of the above passwords
  • two different corporate IM systems, again coin toss depending on what team you’re working with
  • nannyware everywhere. Open Performance Monitor and watch network activity spike anytime you move your mouse or hit a key
  • an internally developed secure document system used by an international division that we were instructed to never ever use. We were told by IT that it “does something to the PC at a hardware level if you install the reader and open a document” which would cause a PC to be banned from the network until we get it replaced. Sounds hyperbolic, but plausible given the rest of the mess.
  • required a mobile authenticator app for some of the above services, yet the company expected that us grunts use our personal devices for this purpose.
  • all of the above and more, yet we were encouraged to use any cloud hosted password manager of our choosing.
Hogger85b,

I'll.go one further with authenticator. Mobile phones were banned in the data center and other certain locations (financial services). Had to set up landline phone....but to do that needed to request it...approve it on my phone then enter data center security door run and answer the phone line with 60s like something in the matrix.

PyroNeurosis, in What are some good (and free) webcomics?
@PyroNeurosis@lemmy.world avatar

Narbonic and its successor Skin Horse are both now complete and never get the love I feel they deserve.

Orionza, in Gamers who have gamed for a long time
@Orionza@lemmy.world avatar

Yep. Why is this? I stopped buying games because I end up sticking to the same ones and types that give me the most joy, where I feel like I’m achieving something and not wasting my time.

If i open a game now that’s too difficult to learn, has too many key options, is too bright for or hard on the eyes, is gory, doesn’t have bag space and wants to nickel and dime me for it, etc…I just stop. Red Dead Redemption - beautiful game and I crave to go back. It is too difficult and causes me so much stress. Not worth it. There was this other game I wanted to play. The controls and interface was just awful. Look around the world caused motion sickness and hurt the eyes. WoW - toxic community.

When you get older, I think you learn what works for you. What feels comfortable. What feels good. What makes you happy. Because that’s what you’re there for, to be happy.

icedterminal,

Wow has taken such a bad turn in cultivating a toxic community.

GladiusB, in Gamers who have gamed for a long time
@GladiusB@lemmy.world avatar

I have some titles I play a lot and some what often. Other are just for fun to break it up. I don’t know if I am going to play it forever or just for a couple of days.

Lexam, in Tech workers - what did your IT Security team do that made your life hell and had no practical benefit?

Locked down our USB ports. We work on network equipment that we have to use the USB port to log in to locally.

mesamunefire,

One place I worked at did this but had bluetooth on no issues. People brought all kinds of things to the office.

iliketurtles, in Gamers who have gamed for a long time

I probably game just as much as I used to, but it’s only one game at a time now that I’ll play for years. Used to chase all the releases and hype. Now I just want to space out and have fun.

countflacula, in Tech workers - what did your IT Security team do that made your life hell and had no practical benefit?

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.

Brkdncr,

Local admin of your interactive account is just. Ad though.

glad_cat,

I had the same problem once. Every time I needed to be an admin, I had to send an email to an outsourced guy in another country, and wait one hour for an answer with a temporary password.

With WSL and Linux, I needed to be admin 3 or 4 times per day. I CCed my boss for every request. When he saw that I was waiting and doing nothing for 4 hours every day, he sent them an angry email and I got my admin account back.

The stupid restriction was meant for managers and sales people who didn’t need an admin account. It was annoying for developers.

mesamunefire,

I worked at a big name health insurance company that did the same. You would have to give them an email, wait a week, then give them a call to get them to do anything. You could not install anything yourself, it was always a person that remote into your computer. After a month, I still didn’t have visual studio installed when they wanted me to work on some .Net. Then they installed the wrong version of Visual Studio. So the whole process had to be restarted.

I got a new job within 3 months and just noped out.

ExtraMedicated, in What are some good (and free) webcomics?
alertsleeper, in Gamers who have gamed for a long time

I find that this only happens to me in relation to AAA titles. I just don’t have time to put 60 hrs into a game.

But since I started playing indies I feel like rejuvenated

dgmib, in Tech workers - what did your IT Security team do that made your life hell and had no practical benefit?

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.

CosmicTurtle,

Could work if dev was upstream from prod. But honestly there would be no difference between that and branches.

Rednax,

Maybe it is a rights issue. Preventing a prod build agent of sorts to access develop code.

CosmicTurtle,

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

Potatos_are_not_friends, (edited )

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.

dgmib,

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.

Tar_alcaran,

I’m honestly not sure how they thought that would work.

Just manually copy-paste everything. That never goes wrong, right?

lightnegative,

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

mesamunefire,

Yep doing that now. Not sustainable in the slightest. Im glad im not in charge of that system.

AnnaPlusPlus, in What are some good (and free) webcomics?

Irregular Webcomic: it’s mostly reruns these days with new strips twice a week. Still, there is a lot of material to get caught up on.

I enjoy Adventures of God if you want another webtoons comic

Hogger85b, in Tech workers - what did your IT Security team do that made your life hell and had no practical benefit?

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.

netburnr,
@netburnr@lemmy.world avatar

There is no compliance item I am aware of that has that requirement, some CISO needs to learn to read.

Hobo,

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.

www.stigviewer.com/stig/…/V-69243

chiliedogg,

And that’s why people use mouse jigglers and keep their computers unlocked 24/7.

fat_stig,

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.

0xD,

The internal IT at that hellhole is a nightmare as well.

FooBarrington,

That’s why you buy a jiggler that you place your mouse onto. Not detectable by IT :)

lightnsfw,

I set my pocket knife on the ctrl key when I have to step away.

lazylion_ca,

That works?

lightnsfw,

Idk about every application but it keeps windows from timing out which serves most purposes for me.

FooBarrington,

Does that keep your status in Teams as “online”? That’s what I use the jiggler for - if I’m waiting for CI tests which take 30+ minutes and I sit in front of the laptop, I don’t want to have to manually jiggle my mouse every couple of minutes just to keep my status.

lightnsfw,

Yep

FooBarrington,

Awesome, thank you!

Krudler,

Ahhh the old “level up an RPG Skill by jamming a pen cap into a key and going to watch Night Court reruns” method.

Thanks, I actually didn’t know holding CTRL would keep the system awake!

fat_stig,

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.

Aceticon,

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.

drudoo,

Absolutely love my Uno keyboard for this 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.

glue_snorter,

I used a Sidewinder keyboard for years with programmable macros.

Yeah, I had my password as a macro.

Dick move on my part as the macro, I’m fairly sure, is stored in plaintext on the PC. But the convenience was great. I don’t do that any more.

Aceticon,

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.

steal_your_face,
@steal_your_face@lemmy.ml avatar

Can also just buy one from Amazon if you’re lazy or not technically inclined.

Aceticon,

Well, my off the cuff suggestion was what seems simple to me in this domain ;)

That said I get what you mean and agree.

JSocial, in Finding a good old-style offline German course

Ah, it sounds to me like you’re wanting something kind of like the old Pimsleur German CDs. Looks like the current iteration is a subscription model with option to buy. I only remember the mp3s I downloaded years ago.

TonyToniToneOfficial,
@TonyToniToneOfficial@lemmy.ml avatar

Second the pimsleur approach

d00phy, in Tech workers - what did your IT Security team do that made your life hell and had no practical benefit?

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 gibberish@stupidsubdomain.company.com. 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?

RogueBanana,

Is it actually gibberish? I have never seen a company use anything other than parts of first name last name at company.

d00phy,

I’m sure it meant something to someone, but it was just letters and numbers to me.

tsz, in Tech workers - what did your IT Security team do that made your life hell and had no practical benefit?

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

thisbenzingring,

I was a network administrator at a site, which just made me a glorified system admin with responsibility for the network and switches.

Everyone in the IT Dept had the password for the switches. After one person gave a 3rd party vendor the password, I had to change the passwords and exclude him from having it… but then everyone else got the password.

That place was nuts, between that and a few other stupid boss actions, I just moved on. Found a much better job and it was for the best.

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