Now I'm nervous enough about these Windows zero day exploits to not use windows (using Ubuntu now). I just expected them to be even more paranoid than me.
Ultimately many of the analyst tools they use are decades old, and only support Windows.
However, they must have s/w engineers. I'm curious how they do their jobs w/o stack-overflow, google and obviously HN. :)
Yes, it's possible to do dev w/o an internet connection, but programming nowadays is a pita, especially as a full-stacker. i.e. I just had to deal with a sticky css footer problem and I would have topped myself if I didn't have the internet.
Though they'd still have to be careful that what they search doesn't give anything away, and that an adversary might be injecting results, so maybe not.
There probably are machines connected to the public internet, but if you need to lock your workstation, walk over to the designated unclassified machine, log in to that, do your search, write down or print the answer, log out of that machine, walk back to your workstation and then unlock it - every time you want to look up a CSS thing - you'd probably just ask your boss to buy you a dang book.