More Zonkyness

(actually we don’t usually sit in the data centre; it’s too noisy and usually the wrong temperature for people)

There is a perception amongst people that security “gurus” who work in network security are spying on all your network traffic. Not the hackers (which is a whole other matter), but the people who run enterprise firewalls. We do, but we’re not interested in what you are doing but instead what is being done to you (and the enterprise as a whole).

Frankly nothing strikes me as more boring than spying on someone’s porn browsing – if I really need to, I’ll hunt down my own porn thank you very much! And we’re busy; you could probably double the size of every network security team in every organisation on the planet and still nobody would be sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

On the subject of porn (as an extreme example), it is not a security issue. There is an argument that browsing porn sites is putting yourself at greater risk of picking up some kind of nasty infection, but avoiding porn sites to avoid getting infected with malware is a tactic that results in your computer being infected. So the intended content isn’t a problem as far as security is concerned, but we’re interested in unintended content.

Now there are places that enforce browsing censorship – blocking anything that isn’t work-related. That role is usually dumped on the network security people because they have the tools to do the job.

Does porn browsing on the office matter? Of course it does – some people are upset by the sight of such things, and almost as important, when someone is browsing porn they are not working. But such matters are best dealt with in the office by the line manager – if someone isn’t doing their work it doesn’t matter if they are browsing porn, hitting Facebook, or snoozing under the desk. All should be dealt with appropriately by the line manager.

And centralised censorship is a rather clumsy tool – blocking Facebook is all very well if it is to prevent personal usage of the Internet, but what about the Marketing department using Facebook for publicity? Or the Customer Service department keeping an eye on Facebook for product problems that they need to look into? These can be allowed through on a case-by-case basis, but it highlights that censorship is a clumsy tool.

The word from a nameless vendor who is in this space, is that in many cases this censorship has less to do with preventing people from doing “naughty” things, and more to do with controlling bandwidth usage. And as bandwidth becomes cheaper, there is less interest in censoring Internet activities – certainly from a personal perspective I notice a decrease in the number of people who complain they cannot visit certain sites because of work’s “firewall”.

There is also the subject of TLS inspection where firewalls intercept and inspect TLS or SSL encrypted traffic between you and “out there”. Again there is a suspicion that we are for whatever reason spying on your activities. The answer to this is the same as previously – why should we bother? It is too much like hard work, and frankly most of the information that passes through a firewall is unbelievably boring.

No, TLS interception is used to do the boring task of inspecting traffic for malware, spyware, and other security threats. And with the increasing use of TLS to encrypt traffic it is becoming more and more important to do TLS interception for security reasons.

Yes there are those who would use that sort of technology to spy on your activities, but those organisations are typically nation states … and repressive ones at that. But it is extreme foolishness to blame a useful tool for the abuses that an abusive government perpetrates.  Your average enterprise just isn’t that interested in what you’re up to.

And if you still don’t believe this, there is a simple answer: Do anything private on your own private network.