> This of course, Inch does not apply to you or anyone serving this company.
> I'd hope that IT directors would give preferential treatment to anyone who is
> issued an M-16.
Having been on the other end, that is the end responsible for
establishing policies like this (or not, as the case may be):
There are some very good reasons for not letting users fiddle much with
their systems. There's equally good reasons to keep personal machines
off corporate networks.
Believe me, everyone in IT really wishes the whole company were
self-supporting, knew what they were doing when installing software,
editing the registry, disabling the virus-checker because it won't let
them open that wonderful email attachment from their friend in
Engineering (never mind the SMTP headers say it came from Azerbaijan),
setting the machine to automatically log them on to their laptop at boot
and disable the password lock on their screensaver because it's just too
much work to log on again after they leave their machine at their table
at Starbucks and go take a whizz...
Most of the really good attacks these days start as social-engineering
efforts - tiny success ratio x enormous volume = enough success to kill
a company. Even just letting a mail client load images referenced in an
HTML email message from an off-site server can tell the sender of the
message (friendly or not) a whole lot about who/when/where/how the mail
message was read.
John.
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