[jpc0]

Explain exactly how any AV prevents a user from checking e-mails and opening word?

The years I spent doing IT at that level, every time, every single time I got a request for admin privileges to be granted to a user or for software to be installed on an endpoint we already had a solution in place for exactly what the user wanted, installed and tested on their workstation that was taught in onboarding and they simply "forgot".

Just like the users I had to reset their passwords for every monday because they forgot their passwords. It's an irritation but that doesn't mean they didn't do their job well. They met all performance expectations, they just needed to be handheld with technology .

The real world isn't black and white and this isn't Reddit.

[TeMPOraL]

> Explain exactly how any AV prevents a user from checking e-mails and opening word?

For example by doing continuous scans that consume so much CPU the machine stays thermally throttled at all times.

(Yes, really. I've seen a colleague raising a ticket about AV making it near-impossible to do dev work, to which IT replied the company will reimburse them for a cooling pad for the laptop, and closed the issue as solved.)

The problem is so bad that Microsoft, despite Defender being by far the lightest and least bullshit AV solution, created "dev drive", a designated drive that's excluded by design from Defender scanning, as a blatant workaround for corporate policies preventing users and admins from setting custom Defender exclusions. Before that, your only alternative was to run WSL2 or a regular VM, which are opaque to AVs, but that tends to be restricted by corporate too, because "sekhurity".

And yes, people in these situations invent workarounds, such as VMs, unauthorized third-party SaaS, or using personal devices, because at the end of the day, the work still needs to be done. So all those security measures do is reduce actual security.

[kchr]

Most AV and EDR solutions support exceptions, either on specific assets or fleets of assets. You can make exceptions for some employees (for example developers or IT) while keeping (sane) defaults for everybody else. Exceptions are usually applied on file paths, executable image names, file hashes, signature certificates or the complete asset. It sounds like people are applying these solutions wrong, which of course has a negative outcome for everybody and builds distrust.

[TeMPOraL]

In theory, those solutions could be used right. In practice, they never are.

People making decisions about purchasing, deploying and configuring those systems are separated by many layers from rank-and-file employees. The impact on business downstream is diffuse and doesn't affect them directly, while the direct incentives they have are not aligned with the overall business operations. The top doesn't feel the damage this is doing, and the bottom has no way of communicating it in a way that will be heard.

It does build distrust, but not necessarily in the sense that "company thinks I'm a potential criminal" - rather, just the mundane expectation that work will continue to get more difficult to perform with every new announcement from the security team.

[jpc0]

I'm going to just echo my sibling comment here. This seems like a management issue. If IT wouldn't help it was up to your management to intervene and say that it needs to be addressed.

Also I'm unsure I've ever seen an AV even come close to stressing a machine I would spec for dev work. Likely misconfigured for the use case but I've been there and definitely understand the other side of the coin, sometimes a beer or pizza with someone high up at IT gets you much further than barking. We all live in a society with other people.

I would also hazard a guess that the defender drive is more a matter of just making it easier for IT to do the right thing, requested by IT departments more than likely. I personally have my entire dev tree excluded from AV purely because of false positives on binaries and just unnecessary scans because the fines change content so regularly. That can be annoying to do with group policy if where that data is stored isn't mandated and then you have engineers who would be babies about "I really want my data in %USERPROFILE%/documents instead oF %USERPROFILE%/source" now IT can much easier just say that the Microsoft blessed solution is X and you need to use it.

Regarding WSL, if it's needed for you job then go for it and have you manager out in a request. However if you are only doing it to circumvent IT restrictions, well don't expect anyone to play nice.

On the person devices note. If there's company data on your device it and all it's content can be subpoenad in a court case. You really want that? Keep work and personal seperate, it really is better for all parties involved.

[TeMPOraL]

> sometimes a beer or pizza with someone high up at IT gets you much further than barking. We all live in a society with other people.

That's true, but it gets tricky in a large multinational, when the rules are set by some team in a different country, whose responsibilities are to the corporate HQ, and the IT department of the merged-in company I worked for has zero authority on the issue. I tried, I've also sent tickets up the chain, they all got politely ignored.

From the POV of all the regular employees, it looks like this: there are some annoying restrictions here and there, and you learn how to navigate the CPU-eating AV scans; you adapt and learn how to do your work. Then one day, some sneaky group policy update kills one of your workarounds and you notice this by observing that compilation takes 5x as long as it used to, and git operations take 20x as long as they should. You find a way to deal (goodbye small commits). Then one day, you get an e-mail from corporate IT saying that they just partnered with ESET or CrowdStrike or ZScaler or not, and they'll be deploying the new software to everyone. Then they do, and everything goes to shit, and you need to start to triple every estimate from now on, as the new software noticeably slows down everything across the board. You think to yourself, at least corporate gave you top-of-the-line laptops with powerful CPUs and absurd amount of RAM; too bad for sales and managers who are likely using much weaker machines. And then you realize that sales and management were doing half their work in random third-party SaaS, and there is an ongoing process to reluctantly in-house some of the shadow IT that's been going on.

Fortunately for me, in my various corporate jobs, I've always managed to cope by using Ubuntu VMs or (later) WSL2, and that this always managed to stay "in the clear" with company security rules. Even if it meant I had to figure out some nasty hacks to operate Windows compilers from inside Linux, or to stop the newest and bestest corporate VPN from blackholing all network traffic to/from WSL2 (was worth it, at least my work wasn't disrupted by the Docker Desktop licensing fiasco...). I never had to use personal devices, and I learned long ago to keep firm separation between private and work hardware, but for many people, this is a fuzzy boundary.

There was one job where corporate installed a blatant keylogger on everyones' machines, and for a while, with our office IT's and our manager's blessing, our team managed to stave it off - and keep local admin rights - by conveniently forgetting to sign relevant consent forms. The bad taste this left was a major factor in me quitting that job few months later, though.

Anyway, the point to these stories is, I've experienced first-hand how security in medium and large enterprises impacts day-to-day work. I fought both alongside and against IT departments over these. I know that most of the time, from the corporate HQ's perspective, it's difficult to quantify the impact of various security practices on everyone's day-to-day work (and I briefly worked in cybersecurity, so I also know this isn't even obvious to people this should be considered!). I also know that large organizations can eat a lot of inefficiency without noticing it, because at that size, they have huge inertia. The corporate may not notice the work slowing down 2x across the board, when it's still completing million-dollar contracts on time (negotiated accordingly). It just really sucks to work in this environment; the inefficiency has a way of touching your soul.

EDIT:

The worst is the learned helplessness. One day, you get fed up with Git taking 2+ minutes to make a goddamn commit, and you whine a bit on the team channel. You hope someone will point out you're just stupid and holding it wrong, but no - you get couple people saying "yeah, that's how it is", and one saying "yeah, I tried to get IT to fix that; they told me a cooling stand for the laptop should speed things a bit". You eventually learn that security people just don't care, or can't care, and you can only try to survive it.

(And then you go through several mandatory cybersecurity trainings, and then you discover a dumb SQL injection bug in a new flagship project after 2 hours of playing with it, and start questioning your own sanity.)

[jpc0]

Look I'm not disagreeing with you that it sucks. I just know I've been on the other side of the fence and people like to throw shade at IT when they themselves are just trying to do their jobs.

And let's see if we can agree that likely corporate multinationals are probably a bad thing, or at least micromanaging from the stratosphere when you cannot see how youe decision effects things. That however is likely a management antipattern and if it is really negatively effecting your mental health but you are still meeting performance expectations I'm not against you making a decision to walk.

Sometimes the only way to solve those problems is to cause turnover and make management look twice, and a lot of time one key person leaving can cause an exodus that will force change.

Not being negative here, sometimes you are just in a toxic relationship and need to get out.