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.

  • @mystik
    link
    11 year ago

    If it’s a secure enough environment, I imagine that there will be monitoring on the device, and the moment a hub shows up that’s not supposed to be there, or any other USB device tree that doesn’t match the approved list, , alarm bells ought to go off. If it’s valuable enough; the attack would be to use a passive device picking up leaky signals on the wire, or even hidden camera watching screen/keyboard.