[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

I was recently told by an old-timer at my current company that at one point security tried to remove Visual Studio from developers machines because it had reported security incidents.

The problem with security people is that they think security is the most important thing.

[unethical_ban]

The problem with devs is they think all security admins are reductionist. <3

A good security admin will work within the bounds of compliance to make the business work. And any good blocks will be apparent to the user. Trust me, security doesn't enjoy pissing people off, we just accept that it happens sometimes.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

last week a former co-worker called me laughing.

He was on the phone with the CISO who was explaining it's impossible to give him access to SPLUNK because of the network segmentation.

While he's ON THE PHONE, he received an email from the IT group with credentials to access splunk.

And to be clear, I left specifically because of their security stance. I was once told they couldn't automate pulling data from production because of the same reason as mentioned above, the network segmentation wouldn't allow it.

So no, developers aren't just whining because they can't directly access PAN.

Security people always think their concerns should trump everything else. I would almost be willing to bet 70% of the mind-numbingly stupid decisions made across the industry had some security justification behind it.

If human beings took the same approach to safety that Security people do to security, they'd insist the wheels on your vehicle should only be able to turn straight and right. That the vehicle should _actively_ prevent you from turning your wheels left because left turns are more dangerous than right turns and they can show that you can _always_ get to your destination with just right turns.

[unethical_ban]

I'm sorry you're so traumatized by a handful of experiences, and seemingly at only one or two places, that you can't comprehend a workplace or institution with a reasonable security team. They exist. Maybe one day you'll find one.

One of my former employers has developers, network admins and security professionals working together to maintain a deployment pipeline using Github, terraform and AWS to let developers do as much as possible without having to request anything from security, ever. All the guardrails and checks are built in. Labs get to deploy just about anything, test and prod are identical, and prod has implicit restrictions on requiring encryption for data, prohibiting excessively powerful roles, and so on. But they've worked directly with development to get them everything they need ahead of time, in order to make IT and the business as effective as possible.

Security is necessary, and good security does what it can to stay out of the way.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

Of course security is necessary, that's not the complaint.

[slt2021]

Security people usually hate adhoc and one-off requests for random stuff from random people. If you are part of the required business process - then there is 100% established and approved way of doing things. For example for Splunk - CISO simply needs to be added to a AD group that is designated to have Splunk access, something like SOC-analysts group.

For pulling data from prod - this is often discussed. Data in production should not be pulled in lower environments (dev and test), because of segmentation, but you can absolutely operate with Prod data within prod environment, like by using approved production datalake or data warehouse or something.

Believe for every security decision that you think is stupid - there are many incidents that happened, and every rule and ban has happened because of these incodents/breaches/data corruption, etc.

It is like workplace safety instructions, they were written because of workplace injury, same for traffic laws.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

yeah, lets equate someone getting a limb ripped off with allowing developers to have local admin rights.

That's everything that's wrong with the security mindset.

[slt2021]

Developers dont need local admin rights to develop software, plenty of devs at regulated industries work with user rights.

And statistics of developers falling victim of phish attack, credentials stealing that leads to major breach - there are plenty. The most recent Uber hack or Okta hack - were all tied to developer clicking on stupid stuff, opening executables from Internet and getting his a$$ owned.

You just gotta accept the fact that developers are not security specialists, most of them cant even create a software without introducing plenty of bugs and vulnerabilities. They mostly google stuff and copypaste from stackoverflow, install shady barely working packages and copypaste directly into production whatever code snippet they found on the first page of Google results. Thats why they need extra control from security specialists

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

> Developers dont need local admin rights to develop software

And now I'm going to quote myself from earlier to make it clear you're displaying exactly the silliness I was speaking to, with added emphasis.

"If human beings took the same approach to safety that Security people do to security, they'd insist the wheels on your vehicle should only be able to turn straight and right. That the vehicle should _actively_ prevent you from turning your wheels left because left turns are more dangerous than right turns and THEY CAN SHOW THAT YOU CAN ALWAYS GET TO YOUR DESTINATION WITH JUST RIGHT TURNS."

---

You see, you can still get to your destination with no left turns, it's just really damned inconvenient and has costs in terms of happiness and time.

It's a classic case of security people making decisions they themselves don't have to pay the cost of.

And don't get me wrong, you'll often hear security people _CLAIM_ they do, in fact, adhere to all of the security practices they insist on. And they may even do so.

But ...

THESE SECURITY PEOPLE ARE NOT DEVELOPERS.

There's no critical thinking in these decisions. A phone agent working in a very specific application all day doesn't need access to the PC the way a developer does.

---

> And statistics of developers falling victim of phish attack, credentials stealing that leads to major breach - there are plenty. The most recent Uber hack or Okta hack - were all tied to developer clicking on stupid stuff, opening executables from Internet and getting his a$$ owned.

uber hackers got through using slack, okta was a technician RDPing in.

Neither were developers, and unless you're prepared to claim slack wasn't sanctioned by the company, it's all just a long worded admission that removing local admin rights didn't actually help.

Then there's the question of, if someone steals a developers credentials, what do they have access to?

THAT is where the rubber hits the road. I've literally seen the following:

- Disallow developers from running powershell, but they can log directly into DB's with PII and PHI data ("they had a legitimate business need").

- Force developers making 6-figure salaries to "request access" for admin or the installation of software, said requests being granted by support teams of people making a little over minimum wage.

There's a reason why so many people call it security theatre.

> You just gotta accept the fact that developers are not security specialists, most of them cant even create a software without introducing plenty of bugs and vulnerabilities. They mostly google stuff and copypaste from stackoverflow, install shady barely working packages and copypaste directly into production whatever code snippet they found on the first page of Google results. Thats why they need extra control from security specialists

The reason your company is full of such developers is because you took away local admin rights and the ones with options left. You don't even have any left who could mentor the ones that need mentoring, they left too.

Put yourselves in the shoes of that developer who can access PHI at will, but cannot update their Visual Studio in the name of security because it requires local admin rights to do so.

[happimess]

The most secure option is to bury everyone's computer in concrete.

[denton-scratch]

Well, for them, it is and should be the most important thing. The problem bites when management shares that view.