Comment by betaby a day ago
> but a lot of seemingly dumb security policies are due to insurers.
I keep hearing that often on HN, however I've personally never seen seen such demands from insurers. I would greatly appreciate if one share such insurance policy. Insurance policies are not trade secrets and OK to be public. I can google plenty of commercial cars insurance policies for example.
We've been asked that question before on security questionnaires, and our answer has always been, "Forcing users to change passwords regularly is widely regarded as a very bad security practice, and we don't engage in bad security practices." We've never had anyone complain.
I've never had a complaint about anything I put in to a form requesting a quote for insurance. I just get the quote back. Did you write that in the comment expecting an insurance salesperson to call you up and argue passwords with you? Call their back office and say "hey this guy says our password question is crap, get our best guys on it!"?
I just cant imagine any outcome other than it was translated to just a "no" and increased your premium over what it would have otherwise been.
I've also filled out insurance quote forms several times to see the interplay of the questions and price. Quite often many of the questions do not change the quote. So the existence of the question in a form does not imply a change in price, or any true guess at the magnitude of the change at all.
Directly following is question 4.3: "Are users always prevented from installing programs on end-user devices?"
Totally bonkers stuff.
A trend for corporate workstations is moving closer to a phone with a locked-down app store, with all programs from a company software repo.
Eliminating everything but a business's industry specific apps, MS Office, and some well-known productivity tools slashes support calls (no customization!) and frustrates cyberattacks to some degree when you can't deploy custom executables.
That's why this it's been a requirement for Australian government agencies for about 15 years.
In around 2011, the Defence Signals Directorate (now the Australian Signals Directorate) went through and did an analysis of all of the intrusions they had assisted with over the previous few years. It turned out that app whitelisting, patching OS vulns, patching client applications (Office, Adobe Reader, browsers), and some basis permission management would have prevented something like 90% of them.
The "Top 4" was later expanded to the Essential Eight which includes additional elements such as backups, MFA, disabling Office macros and using hardened application configs.
https://www.cyber.gov.au/resources-business-and-government/e...
Then the users start using cloud webapps to do everything. I can't install a PDF-to-excel converter, so I'll use this online service to do it.
At first glance that might seem a poor move for corporate information security. But crucially, the security of cloud webapps is not the windows sysadmins' problem - buck successfully passed.
I don’t think locking down slashes support calls because you will now receive support requests anytime someone wants to install something and actually have a good business reason to do so.
This is standard practice for years in big corporations.
You install software via ticket requests to IT, and devs might have admin rights, but not root, and only temporary.
This is nothing new though, back in the timesharing days, where we would connect to the development server, we only got as much rights as required for the ongoing development workflows.
Hence why PCs felt so liberating.
The fun part is that they don't demand anything, they just send you a worksheet that you fill out and presumably it impacts your rates. You just assume that whatever they ask about is what they want. Some of what they suggest is reasonable, like having backups that aren't stored on storage directly coupled to your main environment.
The worst part about cyber insurance, though, is that as soon as you declare an incident, your computers and cloud accounts now belong to the insurance company until they have their chosen people rummage through everything. Your restoration process is now going to run on their schedule. In other words, the reason the recovery from a crypto-locker attack takes three weeks is because of cyber insurance. And to be fair, they should only have to pay out once for a single incident, so their designated experts get to be careful and meticulous.
It cuts both ways. I've struggled to get things like backups or multifactor authentication approved without being able to point to some force like regulation or insurance providers that can dislodge executives' inertia.
My mental model at this point says that if there's a cost to some important improvement, the politics and incentives today are such that a typical executive will only do the bare minimum required by law or some equivalent force, and not a dollar more.
I found an example!
https://retail.direct.zurich.ch/resources/definition/product...
Questionnaire Zurich Cyber Insurance
Question 4.2: "Do you have a technically enforced password policy that ensures use of strong passwords and that passwords are changed at least quarterly?"
Since this is an insurance questionnaire, presumably your answers to that question affect the rates you get charged?
(Found that with the help of o4-mini https://chatgpt.com/share/680bc054-77d8-8006-88a1-a6928ab99a...)