Banned open source software because of security concerns. For password management they require LastPass or that we write them down in a book that we keep on ourselves at all times. Worth noting that this policy change was a few months ago. After the giant breach.

And for extra absurdity: MFA via SMS only.

I wish I was making this up.

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.

One IT security team insisted we have separate source code repositories for production and development environments.

I’m honestly not sure how they thought that would work.

Here in Portugal the IT guys at the National Health Service recently blocked access to the Medical Doctor’s Union website from inside the national health service intranet.

The doctors are currently refusing to work any more overtime than the annual mandatory maximum of 150h so there are all sorts of problems in the national health service at the moment, mainly with hospitals having to close down emergency services to walk-in patients (this being AskLemmy, I’ll refrain from diving into the politics of it) so the whole things smells of something more than a mere mistake.

Anyways, this has got to be one of the dumbest abuses of firewalling “dangerous” websites I’ve seen in a long while.

Removed admin access for all developers without warning and without a means for us to install software. We got access back in the form of a secondary admin account a few days later, it was just annoying until then.

I had to run experiments that generate a lot of data (think hundreds of megabytes per minute). Our laptops had very little internal storage. I wasn’t allowed to use an external drive, or my own NAS, or the company share - instead they said “can’t you just delete the older experiments?”… Sure, why would I need the experiment data I’m generating? Might as well /dev/null it!

Over 150 Major Incidents in a single month.

Formerly, I was on the Major Incident Response team for a national insurance company. IT Security has always been in their own ivory tower in every company I’ve worked for. But this company IT Security department was about the worst case I’ve ever seen up until that time and since.

They refused to file changes, or discuss any type of change control with the rest of IT. I get that Change Management is a bitch for the most of IT, but if you want to avoid major outages, file a fucking Change record and follow the approval process. The security directors would get some hair brained idea in a meeting in the morning and assign one of their barely competent techs to implement it that afternoon. They’d bring down what ever system they were fucking with. Then my team had to spend hours, usually after business hours, figuring out why a system, which had not seen a change control in two weeks, suddenly stopped working. Would security send someone to the MI meeting? Of course not. What would happen is, we would call the IT Security response team and ask if anything changed on their end. Suddenly 20 minutes later everything was back up and running. With the MI team not doing anything. We would try to talk to security and ask what they changed. They answered “nothing” every god damn time.

They got their asses handed to them when they brought down a billing system which brought in over $10 Billion (yes with a “B”) a year and people could not pay their bills. That outage went straight to the CIO and even the CEO sat in on that call. All of the sudden there was a hard change freeze for a month and security was required to file changes in the common IT record system, which was ServiceNow at the time.

We went from 150 major outages (defined as having financial, or reputation impact to the company) in a single month to 4 or 5.

Fuck IT Security. It’s a very important part of of every IT Department, but it is almost always filled with the most narcissistic incompetent asshats of the entire industry.

Locked down our USB ports. We work on network equipment that we have to use the USB port to log in to locally.

ZScaler. It’s supposedly a security tool meant to keep me from going to bad websites. The problem is that I’m a developer and the “bad website” definition is overly broad.

For example, they’ve been threatening to block PHP.Net for being malicious in some way. (They refuse to say how.) Now, I know a lot of people like to joke about PHP, but if you need to develop with it, PHP.Net is a great resource to see what function does what. They’re planning on blocking the reference part as well as the software downloads.

I’ve also been learning Spring Boot for development as it’s our standard tool. Except, I can’t build a new application. Why not? Doing so requires VSCode downloading some resources and - you guessed it - ZScaler blocks this!

They’ve “increased security” so much that I can’t do my job unless ZScaler is temporarily disabled.

They set zscaler so that if I don’t access an internal service for an unknown number of months, it means I don’t need it “for my daily work”, so they block it. If I want to access it again I need to open a ticket. There is no way to know what they closed and when they’ll close something.

In 1 months since this policy is active, I already have opened tickets to access test databases, k8s control plane, quality control dashboards, tableau server…

I really cannot comment how wrong it is.

Took away Admin rights, so everytime you wanted to install something or do something in general that requires higher privileges, we had to file a ticket in the helpdesk to get 10 minutes of Admin rights.

The review of your request took sometimes up 3 days. Fun times for a software developer.

I am not allowed to change my wallpaper.