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

submitted 1 year ago by Krudler to c/asklemmy

253 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] tractus 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

[–] Krudler 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.

[–] totallynotarobot 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] Krudler 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] AtariDump 4 points 1 year ago

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