After self hosting several services for a few users, with SSO, backups, hardware issues etc, I really appreciate how good the IT was in my old company. Everything was connected, smooth, slick and you could tell it was secure. I had very few issues and when I did, they were quickly solved. Doing this all at scale for thousands of employees spread across the world, it is a wonderful sight to see.
Now at my current company, it’s at the opposite end of the scale where I almost believe that I could do a better job by myself! They’ve trying to do everything you would expect but somehow doing it wrong. They are so heavy on security I have a Citrix environment that takes me 3 logins to get to, fails constantly and means I can’t work without internet (like on a long train journey for work purposes recently), and on the other hand they’ve only just turned off admin rights for users so we could’ve installed anything we wanted!!! All our attachments (incoming and outgoing) are saved to a secure website (like OneDrive) and replaced with a link. It doesn’t save the file names on the email so it’s really tricky to find old emails if it’s a document you’re looking for. I could go on but just venting at this point as it’s so frustrating!!!
Thank you to the good IT people out there. Your roles are so important but not appreciated enough!
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My favorite is when IT deploys software that replaces all the links in your e-mails with
https://example.com/phishing/YiCdMdsYso you can’t tell whether the e-mail is phishing or not, frequently sends you very obvious fake phishing e-mails that interrupt your work by going straight to your priority inbox, and punishes anyone caught clicking on phishing e-mails. Then HR sends out e-mails that have all the indicators of low effort phishing and you’re supposed to click on those.Omg, my previous company did the same. But you missed a part. If you accidentally left out a real email, thinking it’s a scam, then the client will file a complaint.
I always click to see if the phishing email is real or not!
New action items have been assigned to you:
- Remedial cybersecurity training (4hr): due by Mar 22
Had one of those. Very convincing. Showed my boss. My boss also thought I could be real. So I clicked it. The landing page was an internal “you’ve been caught” page. Then I got the phishing-email training assignment.
Gallagher were great at that, rubbish solution for “teaching” staff about phishing which would infuriate all staff caught in the net. Would come from internal email addresses too which, if one person’s email / credentials are compromised they’ve got bigger fish to fry.
Broken company mechanics in a nut shell
Most IT departments have the mindset of avoiding troubles instead of making things easy for users. They don’t want to get blamed for security incidents. They want things to be predictable and within control.
They sacrifice a lot of user convenience doing that. On the other hand, IT giants are enshittificating IT services.
Who said security ever had to be difficult for the end-users? The companies that charge $15k per month per service to keep your company audit-ready. Oh and Microsoft is one of the more “seamless” providers for auth and security services out there, amazing.
I am a former IT Desktop drone…er…support worker… I used to swap towers for my local municipality back when Windows XP was being replaced with 7. I saw passwords on post-its attached to the monitor, mouse pad, and even under the keyboard or keyboard drawer (I had to get under desks to do the swap). Our policy was to remove those whenever we saw them and trash them in a different can across the building or a different one. They have a standard 90 day password cycle and most people couldn’t handle that. I would answer the phone often to 'unlock" their account after 3 attempts. My all time favorite when I would help an end user with software was when I would encounter someone’s “God Mode” icon for some of the registry hacks that used to float around. Everyone had Admin privileges (ironically), so it wasn’t really needed anyway.
Their primary server admins and IT folks in the main office were Top notch though. Never any downtime and the main security guy was very strong in making sure everything was adhered to. We, as desktop support didn’t have the master password to decrypt a laptop which was GPG protected and had to bring it to him if we had a user which locked themselves out. With great consternation, only a few machines would be allowed to XP and those were VLAN’d and isolated from the outside world.
The rest of the server admins handled everything with ease seemingly. The fun part was when they had a third party come in and do a security audit. No problems on the server side, but it wasn’t a success. They did the 'ol drop a flash drive randomly in different locations test. Knowing human nature, they knew someone would pick it up, plug it in and be baited with an excel file which looked like it had financials. Unbeknownst to the user, it sent a ping to their reporting server and the drive ID. Which was later reported back. They also did physical security penetration tests - walk in behind you type of thing. I remember seeing a group of guys non company ID badges try to follow me into the main IT office. I stopped them and asked who they were and what they wanted (this was a Govt building), and the look of confusion mixed with satisfaction from them that I stopped them was priceless. I let the head IT guy know who was at the door and left it up to them to unlock it for them.
I now work in a help desk position for a software company and miss those days of desktop support. But, I know for a fact that I.T. Guys an Gals don’t get enough recognition. They are the understated backbone of a company’s well-being especially when holidays and weekends are prime time for systems to fail and they are practically on call no matter what.
When we do it right, you forget we’re here and we’re ok with that.
I’ve been in IT for a couple decades at this point. I stopped doing almost any swlf-hosted stuff years ago as I just don’t have the time or energy to deal with things. There’s a lot to keep up on with technologies, security, etc. not to mention all the constants of keeping things up-to-date, back-ups, troubleshooting issues, and more
True words. The sustained effort to keep something in decent shape over years is not to be underestimated. Now when life changes and one is not able or willing anymore to invest that amount of time, ill-timed issues can become quite the burden. At one point I decided to cut down on that by doing a better founded setup, that does backup with easy rollback automatically, and updates semi-automatically. I rely on my server(s), and all from having this idea to having it decently implemented took me a number of months. Just because time for such activities is limited, and getting a complex and intertwined system like this reliably and fault tolerant automated and monitored is simply something else than spinning up a one off service
Compliance and money. Probably has little to do with the team itself and more about the business needs.
My new workplace has a web portal to give jobs to the maintenance team, and the web browser says “Insecure” in the corner.
My self hosted stuff has that too. Difference is I plan to learn how to do something about it
I recently set up DNSSEC on my home domain, and I have been shocked to learn that none of my financial institutions use it. Going back through my logs, the only external host that even tries is api.weather.gov, and only for the CNAME pointing to a CDN host.
I mean it’s not the worst. Is it still https? Or are they serving plain ol http? My internal services (at home) are mostly https, but the certs are self signed so browsers will flag them as “insecure”.
I just clicked on it to see. “This site does not have a certificate”
My internal servers are the same, all http. But I started self hosting 2 weeks ago…
My experience with my company is exact opposite. Apparently Bitwarden and Vivaldi are not allowed because they have a lot of vulnerabilities so people should continue using edge/chrome and a plain text for storing all their passwords that they often show it on screen share. Had an issue with 2FA cause those assholes decided it’s fun to force the Microsoft propriety authenticator for everyone so I can’t use aegis anymore. That issue took a whole fucking month to get resolved cause none of them could comprehend their almighty Microsoft app didn’t work on my grapheneos. On a unrelated note, anyone got any openings at your company?
How could you tell it was secure?
Lots of little things really. Obviously I couldn’t say for certain but they seemed to on top of it without causing us too much difficulty in doing our jobs.
Sometimes things were blocked like if a new email, or questioned after to check it was expected and followed policy. Policies were clear, and there were helpful prompts or warnings.
We were involved in something where we had to copy a sh*t load of files from a shared folder to a hard disk. There were like three automatic blocks that kicked in at different times, which was a pain at first to figure out but because we had a good reason, someone in IT just kept at it to get it done and looking back, that should have raised flags given the size of it all.
They changed from passwords changing every 6 months to no changes but had to be longer and mandatory 2FA. We were told to use keepass for all passwords for things that weren’t SSO for various reasons.
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