Post

SwiftOnSecurity
@swiftonsecurity.com

You meet the users where they are to stop them doing the stupidest shit imaginable. You have no idea how much this paid off. The number of infected media players people downloaded in the age before Windows Media Player had more than three codecs is unimaginable Who knows if I saved the firm

SwiftOnSecurity
@swiftonsecurity.com

An exposure analysis would say hey people having VLC is a source of vulnerability because the parsers are not exactly strong and easy to exploit. And I would come back and tell them people are literally directly installing malware on their computers. They run the EXE. Is that good enough for you?

5 reposts178 likes

Xy, First Minister of Furries and Autism
@xylaria.vg

Especially in an enterprise setting, there's like a 90% chance you're already running intrusion detection/firewall. (Until last year I'd have basically guaranteed it was Crowdstrike, but uh, 'bout that. People are shifting.) If your detection is worth a fuck, it'll cover those minor VLC holes easy.

Sandra "Chumplet" Cormier
@chumplet.bsky.social

My son is in Security & husband is a retired desktop support specialist - they installed VLC on our home machines, but I wasn't aware corporate machines were released with VLC installed. Maybe it's not standard with all companies. I have other video apps safely installed, so I have choices.

Scynthious 🚫👑
@scynthious.bsky.social

The most surreal moment in my IT career was sitting at a workstation in a Tyvek suit clearing viruses from a laptop looking up at a banner that read "THAAD Lab". '03 or '04 - Honeywell campus in Clearwater. They were bleeding money. We restarted the clear 3 times because users kept reinfecting.

Scynthious 🚫👑
@scynthious.bsky.social

And when I say bleeding money, I was onsite for almost 20 days, making obscene money as a contractor plebe. I think they were spending upwards of $125k/day for us. There were C-level execs hustling around with CDs and floppies and little round stickers to mark workstations done.