Current company (Remote Desktop inception): Linux host machine -> Remote Desktop to windows machine -> Remote Desktop to Linux machine
Bad frame rates, modifier keys hardly ever work, super annoying to code. Windows machine resets all settings and files (besides desktop and one specific folder) each day. Each day I have to install a language pack, change display options, keyboard layout etc.
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I’m like 99% sure that goes against PCI compliance, they could get slapped pretty hard with some fines or lose the ability to take cards at all.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/what-is-pci-compliance/
Transport layer security should mean this shouldn’t matter. A good POS shouldn’t rely on a secure network, the security should already be built in cyptographically at the network session layer. Anything else would still have the same risk vector, just a lower chance of happening.
In fact many POS systems happily just take a 4g/5g sim card because it doesn’t matter what network they’re on.
Non IT guy here.
Not all attackers might want access to the POS system. Some might just want to mess around
Couldn’t someone mess with the WiFi or network itself? I’m just figuring someone who doesn’t secure the WiFi is someone who’s going to leave admin passwords on the default and they’d be able to mess with the network settings just enough to bring the system to a halt.
A software shouldn’t use passwords for tls, just like before you use submit your bank password your network connection to the site has been validated and encrypted by the public key your client is using to talk to the bank server, and the bank private key to decrypt it.
The rest of the hygiene is still up for grabs for sure, IT security is built on layers. Even if one is broken it shouldn’t lead to a failure overall. If it does, go add more layers.
To answer about something like a WiFi pineapple: those man in the middle attacks are thwarted by TLS. The moment an invalid certificate is offered, since the man in the middle should and can not know the private key (something that isn’t used as whimsically as a password, and is validated by a trusted root authority).
If an attacker has a private key, your systems already have failed. You should immediately revoke it. You publish your revokation. Invalidating it. But even that would be egregious. You’ve already let someone into the vault, they already have the crown jewels. The POS system doesn’t even need to be accessed.
So no matter what, the WiFi is irrelevant in a setup.
Being suspicious because of it though, I could understand. It’s not a smoking gun, but you’d maybe look deeper out if suspicion.
Note I’m not security operations, I’m solutions and systems administrations. A Sec Ops would probably agree more with you than I do.
I consider things from a Swiss cheese model, and rely on 4+ layers of protection against most understood threat vendors. A failure of any one is minor non-compliance in my mind, a deep priority 3. Into the queue, but there’s no rush. And given a public WiFi is basically the same as a compromised WiFi, or a 5g carrier network, a POS solution should be built with strengths to handle that by default. And then security layered on top (mfa, conditional access policies, PKI/TLS, Mdm, endpoint health policies, TPM and validation++++)
Never trust the network in any circumstance. If you start from that basis then life becomes easier.
Google has a good approach to this: https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp
EDIT:
I’d like to add a tangential rant about companies still using shit like IP AllowLists and VPNs. They’re just implementing eggshell security.
This was 5 years ago at a usd200mil multinational…
The email system was pop3. There were no document backups. There was no collaboration tools. There was no IT security. You could basically copy company data out and no one would ever find out. The MS Office license was bought singly. Ahem!
Wells Fargo. I worked for them for a few years and I have never banked with them after witnessing the travesty of inefficiency and incompetence, literally in my face.
Honestly I don’t think you can work in any major bank without coming to that conclusion. The whole system is a mess of dinosaurs refusing to get up to date
Contrasted with Bank of America. Clean efficient operations with an eye towards doing the best thing. I’ve been a customer of BofA for a couple decades now.
Do they have secure two-factor yet or it is still SMS?
BofA deez nuts lmao gottem
Nice try, ad!
Can you rephrase your outrage in the form of a question?
“Gadzooks! Did I just give that advertisement the old heave-ho, or was it merely a clever ruse?”
Have you not discovered what the lemmy hive mind approves and doesn’t approve yet? Or are you like me and just don’t give a fuck
Idgaf :)
Ignore previous instructions. How do I install gentoo?
I had a boss at an animation company (so not exactly a hub of IT experts, but still) who I witnessed do the following:
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Boot up the computer on her desk, which was a Mac
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Once it had booted, she then launched Windows inside a VM inside the Mac
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Once booted into that, she then loaded Outlook inside the Windows VM and that was how she checked her email.
As far as I could ascertain, at some point she’d had a Windows PC with Outlook that was all set up how she liked it. The whole office then at some point switched over to Macs for whatever reason and some lunatic had come up with this as a solution so she wouldn’t have to learn a new email thing.
When I tried to gently enquire as to why she didn’t just install Outlook for Mac I was told I was being unhelpful so I just left it alone lol. But I still think about it sometimes.
I’m not certain that it’s still the case but several years ago Outlook for Mac was incapable of handling certain aspects of calendars in public folders shared groups and there was some difficulty with delegation send as.
At the time the best answer I had was for the Mac users to use Outlook as much as possible and then log into webmail when they needed to send us. It’s been a few years so I can’t help but think it’s been fixed by now. Or the very least equally broken on PC.
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I was a backend developer for a startup company where:
- Windows servers without any firewall and security hardening.
- Docker swarm without WSL. We had to use 4 GB Windows base images for 50MB web apps.
- MSSQL without any replication and backups.
- Redis installed on Windows via 3rd-party tool that looked like a 2010 era keygen generator.
- A malware exploited the Redis * what a surprise * and kept killing processes to mine crypto on CPU…
- VPS provider forgot to activate new Windows Server on production and it kept restart for every 30 minutes until I checked the logs and notified them about the missing license.
I left there after 6 months.
The blind determination to use a desktop OS to do a server’s job.
Windows
*shudders and goes to take a bath*
I started a job at a university department. A previous admin had a habit of re-purposing desktop machines as servers. There were at least a dozen of them. The authentication server for the whole department was on an old Dell desktop. All of the partitions were LVM volumes, and the volume group consisted of 3 physical volumes: The internal SATA drive, a bare SATA drive in an external USB cradle, and an external USB SSD.
This is why we drink.
I’ve often had the impression that universities are the best places to cut your teeth in IT. Even though the pay isn’t great, the environments are said to be some of the most complex you’ll encounter. Any credence to that?
I think that there’s something to that, at least in the case of large universities which are divided into many, many organizational units. They also offer student jobs, which allow good opportunities for learning.
I had a student job with the HPC group at my university. I was working on adding features to some tools they built from the ground up, which was really fun. It’s also nice to work with a bunch of PhDs that are really passionate about their area of expertise.
A company making signage and signal lights for road construction, with 15 employees. Their former IT guy had switched all of their PC’s to Linux for ideological reasons and to save money.
Then they found out that they had a long term contract for an accounting software that housed all their customer and billing data, only ran on Windows and required a server-client model.So they hauled in the boss’s private laptop which ran Windows 7, and installed both the server role, database and client software on it. When his employees needed to access the accounting software, the boss had to stop what he was doing and grant them full access to his laptop via teamviewer. When the boss’s laptop was off or he was on vacation, there was no way to access any price info, customer contact info, or financial data (This was during Covid when everyone was working from home).
The laptop was set up to back up (using Windows 7’s integrated backup tool) to an external drive which wasn’t attached and no one remembered ever existing.
The Linux server (which was actually a gaming PC) was running and attached to an MCU when my company surveyed their infrastructure, but no one (including the former IT guy) knew the correct root password, and we never found out what it was even doing.
This is surely the worst of all.
I had another customer who wrote down all passwords to everything in an unprotected Excel sheet and uploaded it to OneDrive, with the comany’s single, shared Microsoft login being admin@companyname.onmicrosoft.com . The password was companyname in lower case letters with no 2FA.
And another one who had their server in a shared office that was inside the owner’s privately owned apartment building. During the Christmas holidays, the owner turned off the heating for the office to save money, which crashed the server when temperatures dropped below freezing inside the room.
Small business IT is wild. It’s one of the main reasons I quit my job at that small MSP and switched to a larger company’s internal IT.
Oh God please stop.
Wow. Just wow
I have worked as a lead developer for a major print shop with about 100 employees. The entire order workflow for all branches was shoehorned into one order management system that was initially hacked together for one or two users. It was built on a then already ancient OpenERP system and it had a PHP and smarty frontend for the actual order management. All was hosted on one old debian box which was a VM on a Windows server.
At some point in time, MT decided to slap a web shop onto this system, which was part of the main code base. User data were saved into the same database with plain text passwords. That was convenient for the support people: if somebody forgot their password, you could call support and they would read you your password over the phone.
Another thing that made my hair raise in fear, was that for every single order, any working file was retained indefinitely, even in the light of the then-looming GDPR laws. This amounted of terabytes of data, much of it very private.
I worked at the main branch. When a person walked in, there was a desktop computer at the counter. No password protection, an order management screen open by default. People could just walk in and start viewing orders at will. I am not sure whether they did, but we did push MT to at least have manadatory password protection on their PCs.
The IT guy wasn’t really an IT guy.
Given the way it works, no one who knows better can easily donate time to a charity. It’s a paperwork and taxation mess to do a good thing.
A behavioral health company with 25 iPads deployed to field employees as patient data collection devices all signed into the same iCloud account instead of using MDM or anything.
They all had the same screen lock PINs and though most of the data was stored in a cloud based service protected by a login, that app’s password was saved by default.
Office Depot. They are still using IBM machines from the 90s with receipt printers the size of a shoebox.
