[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“Using the wrong technology: I’ve seen all sorts of ways in
which the square peg is pounded into the round hole, but here is
one of my favorite blunders. One client argued with their auditors
that because they have a firewall in front of their secure
webservers it formed a second layer of authentication and so they
were using two-factor authentication, a password and a firewall. I
like the effort, but a firewall (by itself) is not a two factor
authentication solution. Two factor authentication requires your
users have something, it’s something they Know and something they
Have, a token and password for example.“The accidental outage: Many of us have caused an outage at one
time or another. One of our engineers tells a story of being at a
client site when one such outage happened. They were working on the
production firewall server gathering some data for a support case,
the server was windows. The admin reached across the table and
accidentally leaned on the mouse, which was over the Start Menu. As
fate has it in for us network engineers at all times, the mouse
activated the Start Menu and was unbelievably over the shutdown
menu item when it popped up. Yep, right there in the middle of
production this financial corporation watched their production
firewall shutdown.”