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.

  • Punkie
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    408 months ago

    Worked a job where I had to be a Linux admin for a variety of VMs. To access them, I needed an VPN that only worked inside the company LAN, and blocked internet access. it was a 30 day trial license on day 700somthing, so it had a max 5 simultaneous connection limit. Access was from my heavily locked down laptop. Windows 7 with 5 minutes locking Screensaver. The ssh software was an unknown brand, “ssh.exe” which only allowed one connection at a time in a 80 x 24 console window with no ability to copy and paste. This went to a bastion host, an HPUx box on an old csh shell with no write access to your home directory due to a 1.4mb disk quota per user. Only one login per user, ten login max, and the bastion host was the only way to connect to the Linux VMs. Default 5 minute logout for inactivity. No ssh keys allowed. No scripting allowed, was like typing over 9600 baud.

    I quit that job. When asked why, I told them I was a Linux administrator and the job was not allowing me to administrate. I was told “a poor carpenter always blames his tools.” Yeah, fuck you.

    • @FitzNuggly
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      148 months ago

      A carpenter isn’t expected to use his tools with garbage grabbers (reachy claw things) either.

    • Dizzy Devil Ducky
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      fedilink
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      48 months ago

      That sounds like the equivalent of asking a carpenter to build a wooden boat large enough to carry 30 people, but only giving them Fisherprice tools and foam blocks.