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Sep 14Security through Idiocy
by in Feature Articles on 2014-10-22The ticket Bruce found in his help desk queue seemed innocuous enough on the surface. A user in the Finance department complained about not being able to create a file named “Wire Transfer” in their network folder. Being in finance, they did this many times in the past, but suddenly it no longer worked. Bruce assumed the user was doing something wrong, and that it would be resolved in five minutes.
Bruce navigated to the Finance network share, and attempted to create a new file named WireTransfer.txt. A big, ugly “ACCESS DENIED: Security Policy Violation!” message box stared back at him. “That’s odd…” Bruce muttered, knowing he had write access to the directory. “I’ll bet Duane had something to do with this…”
Duane was the resident security “expert”, which always made him Public Enemy #1. He was a kooky old-timer, with a short temper and a low tolerance for human interaction. Duane spent most of his time researching everything but the threats their systems were likely to face. Bruce slinked up to Duane’s office, took a deep breath, and said, “Hey, Duane, I got a ticket for…”