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.

    • 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.

    • 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