I have stopped trying to be the "adult" in our company. I admit that I don't know everything, but two decades of experience has given me some insights. But when I make a suggestion with examples to back them up, my experience is often used against me. I have learned to let it go and allow them to fail on their own. I'm not going to work there for long anyway

So much of this, a company I worked for was like that, I brought up that credit cards were not encrypted/that the monitoring was everywhere but not on critical systems, that dev were using backdoors ( if dev return admin basically) etc, nothing changed. Recently they reported a data leak, no shit...

I think dataleaks aren't punished hard enough. If they did and stung the wallet really hard the industry would quickly adapt to better security requirements.

I'm no so sure -- many managers would just see it as an expeditious cost of doing business, unless it got to kill-the-company-now levels of fines.

I was once talking with an FCC agent about the status of some boards we were importing, and he told me about how Michael Dell would blatantly violate FCC regs with their computers, fight it for a while, then pay the fine out of "Federal Regulatory Account" -- he just happily violated the law and paid the fines enough to have a specific bank acct for that. He was not amused.

I'm pretty sure that it would require a demonstrably real threat of jail all the way up the management chain -- that might focus their minds a bit

No jail, crippling fines that if the behavior doesn't change would wipe them. One example would be sufficient and the industry would fix itself up.

>>unless it got to kill-the-company-now levels of fines.

I did mention that possibility - but to emphasize, it'd have to eb effectively death-penalty for the corporation - just wipe them out.

I'm still not sure that would be sufficient, because there are soooo many examples of horrible managers/executives just torching $$millions and failing up. If any of those executives ever got another job much above the level of sandwich-maker, it would provide no deterrent.

It really looks like at many levels, network and data security needs to be treated as a national security level problem, and any decision to fail to implement state-of-the-art level protections treated as a deliberate compromising of NatSec akin to leaving classified material or CUI (confidential unclassified info) on the sidewalk; not sure what the applicable law is, but that level of negligence is at least the start of serious trouble.

> I've had to get told "this is why we used the cloud... so dinosaur sysadmins like you wouldn't slow us down" by many different companies where I've raised this, and I've had this debate in startup communities where "just open everything up" gets defended as "agile" and "modern devops".

I guess there is some merit to the zero trust security model, since it should urge you to secure every bit of software that you run, without necessarily setting up bastion hosts/DMZs or other types of "server-based ACLs" like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_trust_security_model (since i've seen the fact that you have a "perimeter" get used as an excuse to get lazy about security aside from it)

Yet, i've found that it's just too risky, given how brittle most of our software, including its security functionality, actually is. Just the other day i had even the simple blog software that i use (Grav) fail enforcing its admin login functionality, something that seems incredibly simple on the surface and should be bulletproof, yet somehow wasn't: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/grav-securi...

Thus, personally i've found that what's worthy of consideration is taking a bit from both approaches. For example, running everything in containers with overlay networks (not even dedicated service meshes necessarily, even the way how Docker Swarm does it is pretty good: https://docs.docker.com/network/network-tutorial-overlay/) that can expose your apps/web servers on every node where necessary, yet keep your DBs constrained to running inside of the overlay network and thus remain inaccessible from the outside.

If and when you need to connect them, maybe run a container with SSH and WireGuard/OpenVPN that let's you forward ports and thus get access to the overlay network, or alternatively just use orchestrator functionality (for example, Kubernetes allows this, albeit i dislike its complexity otherwise) for this.

I failed hard on an edit to pamd, which resulted in any password being accepted for any user. Anything but no password.

Not something I would usually test for, but lesson learned. Thank his noodliness we don't have ssh exposed anywhere outside our network.