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observationist 4 hours ago

Someone is making your IT team do extra work without a good understanding of their systems if they're banning tailscale or granting special network level access thinking that ip or mac address based profiling is secure.

Your network should be zero trust. That means you want to treat every host that connects as if it's on the public internet; the corollary to that is you should give your hosts access to the public internet, unrestricted, and treat your users like adults who don't need micromanaging or constant surveillance (do sane logging, ofc.)

If you need a host that's subject to continuous surveillance, design it as such and require remote access with MFA, and so on.

Give your end users as much freedom as possible, and only constrict it where necessary, or you're going to incentivize shadow IT, unintended consequences, and a whole lot of unnecessary make-work that doesn't contribute to security.

Unrestricted access forces change management, design choices, and policy to confront each user and device for the attack vector they are, and to behave accordingly.

panarky 3 hours ago | parent [-]

And then a few of those users who you treated like adults who don't need surveillance make a private network among themselves and other nodes in Russia and China to exfiltrate the corporation's most sensitive intellectual property, serve as a bridge for state-sponsored bad actors to bypass your firewall, and tunnel command-and-control traffic through your "unrestricted" egress, and now your zero-trust philosophy has created a zero-accountability blind spot that your IR team discovers eighteen months later during a breach investigation.

hugo1789 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

What’s the alternative—locking down all legitimate users and still losing the data anyway?

Network controls alone don’t stop exfiltration. HDMI/DP can move data faster than most consumer NICs. Does the system account for that scenario?

idiotsecant 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If your threat is state sponsored bad actors you've already failed. OK, great you blocked VPNs. Now they tunneled their vpn through as HTTPS. You successfully annoyed all your legit users and completely failed to stop the real problem.