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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

I hate the "hacking tools" category. I can't have a copy of netcat on my work machine because it gets flagged as a "hacking tool" and automatically deleted.

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Every few months I get a new tool blacklisted and purged from my work machine. So far I've lost netcat, telnet, nmap, process hacker, several packers, cheatengine, and a few other re tools. And probably more that I haven't noticed yet. My favorite category is "program manipulator/riskware"

Can you build from source? This is often enough to get around automatic detection and/or will be in you're whitelisted development folder. It is also often not against any company policy that would get you in trouble.

Reformat your work machine and regain control.

This is terrible, terrible advice and it's going to get someone fired. I got fired for similar behavior back in 2016. If your company's device policy is preventing you from doing your work, talk to your manager, talk about the work on your plate and the way in which the device policy is slowing you down, make sure your manager understands in concrete terms how this affects your estimates, and then -- either you'll come to a solution, or you'll have to deal with a device policy that slows you down, or you can line up a job elsewhere and resign. Unilaterally breaking the device policy will get you fired, which is a lot more stressful than resigning on a date of your choosing.

I'll add that if you're doing work on managed hardware, you really want IT to be your friends, and this is not a good way to accomplish that. Certainly talk to them too about the impact the device policy is having on you, but don't treat them as the source of your problems, treat them as colleagues who are themselves under various regulatory/policy restrictions and who may be able to help you.

> talk to your manager, talk about the work on your plate and the way in which the device policy is slowing you down, make sure your manager understands in concrete terms how this affects your estimates,

Maybe if you’ve got a sympathetic manager. Otherwise you might just get a reputation as a whiny trouble maker.

Or get a company Mac, it comes with netcat by default :) It's simply part of the OS.

Until the paranoid antivirus tool is loaded on the machine at least.

I don't think it can mess with that. The macOS system files themselves are now on a readonly partition. Even AV can't delete files from that.

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