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.
Often times you’ll find that the crazy things IT does are forced on them from higher ups that don’t know shit.
A common case of this is requiring password changes every x days, which is a practice that is known to actively make passwords worse.
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.
And for extra absurdity: MFA via SMS only.
I wish I was making this up.
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.
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)
To collect numbers, which they sell in bulk, to shadey organizations, that might SIM Jack you.
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.
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.
