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

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.

tractus,

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

AtariDump,

Users would just unplug the keyboard and plug in the USB stick.

Krudler,

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.

totallynotarobot,

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

Krudler,

Well if we’re following the metaphor, yes they were completely on top of preventing imaginary threats that wouldn’t realistically ever materialize lol

perviouslyiner,

Admin access needed to change the clock, which was wrong. Missed a train because of that.

tsz,

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.

SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT,

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.

RozhkiNozhki,
@RozhkiNozhki@lemmy.world avatar

It took them three weeks to have my super secure voicemail PIN reset, only for me to set it to whatever I wanted.

al177,

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.

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