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.

  • body_by_make@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Or it prompts people to just stick their “super secure password” with byzantine special character, numeral, and capital letter requirements to their monitor or under their keyboard, because they can’t be arsed to remember what nonsensical piece of shit they had to come up with this month just to make the damn machine happy and allow them to do their jobs.

      • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I do this in protest of asinine password change rules.

        Nobody’s gonna see it since my monitor is at home, but it’s the principle of the thing.

        • residentmarchant@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          A truly dedicated enough attacker can and will look in your window! Or do fancier things like enable cameras on devices you put near your monitor

          Not saying it’s likely, but writing passwords down is super unsafe

          • Krudler@lemmy.worldOP
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            1 year ago

            What you are describing is the equivalent of somebody breaking into your house so they can steal your house key.

            • curve_empty_buzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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              1 year ago

              No, they’re breaking into your house to steal your work key. The LastPass breach was accomplished by hitting an employee’s personal, out of date, Plex server and then using it to compromise their work from home computer. Targeting a highly privileged employees personal technology is absolutely something threat actors do.

              • Krudler@lemmy.worldOP
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                1 year ago

                The point is if they’re going to get access to your PC it’s not going to be to turn on a webcam to see a sticky note on your monitor bezel. They’re gonna do other nefarious shit or keylog, etc.

                • residentmarchant@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Why keylog and pick up 10k random characters to sift through when the password they want is written down for them?

                  • Rooty@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    Again, how is the attacker going to see a piece of paper that is stuck to the side of the screen? This rule makes sense in high traffic areas, but in a private persons home? The attacker would also need to be a burglar.

    • xkforce@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The DOD was like this. And it wasn’t just that you had to change passwords every so often but the requirements for those passwords were egregious but at the same time changing 1 number or letter was enough to pass the password requirements.

    • xubu@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      I’m in IT security and I’m fighting this battle. I want to lessen the burden of passwords and arbitrary rotation is terrible.

      I’ve ran into a number of issues at my company that would give me the approval to reduce the frequency of expired passwords

      • the company gets asked this question by other customers “do you have a password policy for your staff?” (that somehow includes an expiration frequency).

      • on-prem AD password complexity has some nice parts built in vs some terrible parts with no granularity. It’s a single check box in gpo that does way too much stuff. I’m also not going to write a custom password policy because I don’t have the skill set to do it correctly when we’re talking about AD, that’s nightmare inducing. (Looking at specops to help and already using Azure AD password protection in passive mode)

      • I think management is worried that a phishing event happens on a person with a static password and then unfairly conflating that to my argument of “can we just do two things: increase password length by 2 and decrease expiration frequency by 30 days”

      At the end of the day, some of us in IT security want to do the right things based in common sense but we get stymied by management decisions and precedence. Hell, I’ve brought NIST 800-63B documentation with me to check every reason why they wouldn’t budge. It’s just ingrained in them - meanwhile you look at the number of tickets for password help and password sharing violations that get reported … /Sigh

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        At the end of the day, some of us in IT security want to do the right things based in common sense but we get stymied by management decisions and precedence. Hell, I’ve brought NIST 800-63B documentation with me to check every reason why they wouldn’t budge. It’s just ingrained in them - meanwhile you look at the number of tickets for password help and password sharing violations that get reported …

        Paint the picture for management:

        At one time surgery was the purview of medieval barbers. Yes, the same barbers that cut your hair. At the time there were procedures to intentionally cause people to bleed excessively and cutting holes the body to let the one of the “4 humors” out to make the patient well again. All of this humanity arrived at with tens of thousands of years of existence on Earth. Today we look at this as uninformed and barbaric. Yet we’re doing the IT Security equivalent of those medieval barber still today. We’re bleeding our users unnecessarily with complex frequent password rotation and other bad methods because that’s what was the standard at one time. What’s the modern medicine version of IT Security? NIST 800-63B is a good start. I’m happy to explain whats in there. Now, do we want to keep harming our users and wasting the company’s money on poor efficiency or do we want to embrace the lesson learned from that bad past?

      • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pub
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        1 year ago

        I feel this. I increased complexity and length, and reduced change frequency to 120d. It worked really well with the staggered rollout. Shared passwords went down significantly, password tickets went to almost none (there’s always that ‘one’). Everything points to this being the right thing and the fact that NIST supports this was a win… until the the IT audit. The auditor wrote “the password policy changed from 8-length, moderate complexity, 90-day change frequency to 12-length, high complexity, 120-day change frequency” and the board went apeshit. It wasn’t an infraction or a “ding”, it was only a note. The written policy was, of course, changed to match the GPO, so the note was for the next auditor to know of the change. The auditor even mentioned how he was impressed with the modernity of our policy and how it should lead to a better posture. I was forced to change it back, even though I got buyin from CTO for the change. BS.

    • Krudler@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      That’s super true, so many times to stay ISO compliant (I’m thinking about the lottery industry here), security policies need to align with other recommendations and best practices that are often insane.

      But then there’s a difference between those things which at least we can rationalize WHY they exist… and then there’s gluing USB plugs shut because they read about it on slashdot and had a big paranoia. Lol

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      What I really love is mandatory length and character password policies so complex that together with such password change requirements that push people beyond what is humanly possible to memorize, so it all ends down written in post-its, the IT equivalent of having a spare key under a vase or the rug.

    • ditty@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      For our org, we are required to do this for our cybersecurity insurance plan

      • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        Tell them NIST now recommends against it so the insurance company is increasing your risks

        • Hobo@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The guideline is abundantly clear too with little room for interpretation:

          5.1.1.1 Memorized Secret Authenticators

          Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.

          https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html

    • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      And in my company the password change policies are very different from one system to another. Some force a change monthly, some every 28 days, some every 90 days, and thwn there is rhat one legacy system that no longer has a functioning password change mechanism, so we can’t change passwords there if we wanted to.

      And the different systems all want different password formats, have different re-use rules.

      And, with all those uncoordinated passwords, they don’t allow password managers to be used on corporate machines, despite the training materials that the company makes us re-do every year recommending password managers…

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Forcing password expiration does cause people to make shittier passwords. But when their passwords are breached programitically or through social engineering They don’t just sit around valid for years on the dark web waiting for someone to buy them up.

      • body_by_make@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        This requirement forces people who can’t otherwise remember passwords to fall into patterns like (kid’s name)(season)(year), this is a very common password pattern for people who have to change passwords every 90 days or so. Breaching the password would expose the pattern and make it easy enough to guess based off of.

        • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          99% of password theft currently comes from phishing. Most of the people that get fished don’t have a freaking clue they got fished oh look the Microsoft site link didn’t work.

          Complex passwords that never change don’t mean s*** when your users are willing to put them into a website.

        • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s still not in a freaking list that they can run a programmatic attack against. People that give this answer sound like a f****** broken record I swear.

            • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Years ago phishing and 2fa breaches werent as pervasive. Since we can’t all go to pass key right now, nobody’s doing a damn thing about the phishing campaigns. Secops current method of protection is to pay companies that scan the dark web by the lists and offer up if your password’s been owned for a fee.

              That’s a pretty s***** tactic to try to protect your users.

              • body_by_make@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 year ago

                We’re on the internet, you can say shit.

                If your user is just using johnsmithfall2022 as their password and they update the season and year every time, it’s pretty easy for hackers to identify that pattern and correct it. This is not the solution and it actively makes life worse for everyone involved.

            • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              No never minded people that think that all passwords are being cracked tell me I’m wrong. Lists emails and passwords grabbed from fishing attacks tell me the people that are too lazy to change their passwords and once in awhile don’t deserve the security.

              • glue_snorter@lemmy.sdfeu.org
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                1 year ago

                I’m a native English speaker. I can’t understand your comment. I sense that you have a useful perspective, could you rephrase it so it’s understandable?

      • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        NIST now recommends watching for suspicious activity and only force rotation when there’s risk of compromise

    • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      So glad we opted for a longer password length, with fewer arbitrary limits, and expiry only after 2 years or a suspected breach.

    • vagrantprodigy@lemmy.whynotdrs.org
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      1 year ago

      Even better is forcing changes every 30 or 60 days, and not allowing changes more than every week. Our users complain daily between those rules and the password requirements that they are too dumb to understand.

      • JigglySackles@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Password changes that frequent are shown to be ineffective, especially for the hassle. Complexity is a better protection method.

        • vagrantprodigy@lemmy.whynotdrs.org
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          1 year ago

          I’m aware. Apparently everyone who read my post has misread it. I’m saying that the requirements above are terrible, and they make my users complain constantly. Our security team constantly comes up with ways to increase security theater at the detriment of actual security.