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.

tslnox,

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.

Fosheze,

At a place I used to work one of my coworkers just had their password as a barcode taped to their desk. Now to be fair we worked in the extra high security room so even getting access to that desk would be a little tricky and we had about 20 unlabeled barcoded taped to each of our desks for various inventory locations and functions. So if someone wanted to get into their account they would still have to guess which barcode it was and get into a room only like 10 people had access to. It still felt pretty damn sketchy though.

send_me_your_ink,

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).

tslnox,

Don’t even start me on MFA. It routinely happens to me and all coworkers that it’s not enough to type in the code from the authenticator once, not twice, not even three times. You log in to windows, code prompt. You open Outlook, code prompt. You open SharePoint, another one. OneDrive? Another.

send_me_your_ink,

As someone who manages multiple identity systems - tell your IT to get their act together. Most of my environments we force reaith once a week (and that just a quick enter your password/TOTP code). Otherwise if you can log into your computer we trust you are who you say you are (note: we have some downright scary and invasive stuff on the network so we know if you start accessing stuff you should not). The sensitive/scary stuff is a lot faster (activity timers), but the teams involved know why it’s set this way (and where involved in setting the maximum durations).

Rolive,

Some corporate BS screen lock application that replaces the built in Windows feature. It would take several minutes to log in because of that.

Fortunately you can kill the process with taskmanager and prevent the screen from locking entirely. Lol.

Tischkante,

Everything only needed because it only helps to meet a security standard and to lower insurance. So much useless outdated stuff.

Muscle_Meteor,

This is what i have to do to log into microsoft fuckin teams on my work laptop when i work from home…

  1. Unencrypt my laptop hardrive
  2. Log into my OS
  3. Log into the VPN
  4. Log into teams
  5. Use the authenticator app on my phone to enter the code that is on my screen
  6. Use my fingerprint on my phone to verify that i am the person using my phone…

Step 5 was introduced a few months ago because the other steps weren’t secure enough. This is why half my colleagues aren’t available when they work from home…

I suggested that we just use slack as our work chat and leave teams as a red herring to dissapoint extremely talented hackers.

jasondj,

Don’t reuse passwords!

But make them complicated!

Don’t write them down!

Change them every week!

KISSmyOS,

This is done to keep employees from sticking in unknown thumb drives that could install malware. Several critical systems on protected networks have been hacked in the past by leveraging human curiosity and placing a compromised thumb drive on the ground in the companies parking lot. Gluing shut the USB ports is a simple defense against that.

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