Ask Lemmy

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.

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.