Edit: that was a great Chaos Monkey to reiterate security hygiene. Or was it a Mini Chaos Monkey? https://netflix.github.io/chaosmonkey/
Having attempted to encourage this as a habit for my users for about a year, and not a single one doing it, I've had to come up with other solutions that takes it out of their hands. (It's not business-critical for us, however we try to encourage good security habits all around).
So no, I don't think it is an automatic reaction for the majority of people. Although, this is government - so I would have expected a bit more rigor. Perhaps working in a home environment contributed to relaxing of security habits.
Side note: Windows + L was a bit easier to remember than Ctrl+Alt+Del -> Enter -> Enter for the users who made good faith efforts at making it a habit
I can think of other broadcast communications that would get people fired.
I can tell you, that person never left that thing unlocked ever again.
Change their profile photo (github/slack/etc).
Flip their monitor orientation.
Swap to left-handed mouse buttons (or vice-versa).
Go on Amazon and add some "interesting" things to their wishlist/cart.
Go on Youtube and "like" a bunch of random videos.
It took several months for him to catch on; for a while I had him convinced that his hardware must have an issue where the laptop being left idle for too long caused it to mess up somehow.
alias ls=echo "Segmentation Fault" source ~/.bashrcWhen the …mark… sits down, inevitably with several… "witnesses" behind them, who then point out in "astonishment" the folder on their desktop, they try (in vain) to highlight it to delete it.
(Not appropriate for the workplace, of course.)
Also, scotch tape is not transparent to optical mice? and blocks the sensor. Had that one pulled on me once, took a while to figure it out.
We weighed our options and decided that it was a battle we would rather not waste our effort and risk staff animosity with. When a more serious security incident occurs, or when we decide to implement something else that may require staff effort, we believe that our staff will be more willing to work with us towards a solution.
Sometimes with security policy, a little give (proportional to risk analysis) can go a long way with non-technical staff. I'd rather work with staff to come up with processes that work for both the security staff and all other staff members than become so rigid in my security policy that I may inadvertently alienate the security staff - which has many risks itself.
In my old office, we had this team "tradition" that was supposed to encourage people to lock their desktops. If they left their office for whatever reason and left their desktop unlocked, anyone from the team jumps up to the machine. Then they send an email to the rest of the team on behalf of the person who left their desktop unlocked, saying that they are bringing cookies to share with the team tomorrow.
It worked out well for quite a few years, with people being more mindful about locking their machines. And their "punishment" for not doing so was just sharing cookies with the rest of the team the day after and hearing a couple of jokes about the situation. Overall, very positive experience, no one got upset about anything, because their machines themselves weren't screwed with, their work productivity wasn't lost due to it, and everyone shared a moment and baked goods.
I guess this means setting the timer really low, so that it auto locks after a very short time?
The IT department at my former employer tried this out company-wide and it almost led to them getting attacked physically. When every simple distraction leads to you getting locked out of the desktop (phonecall, boss or coworker having a question) it builds frustration quickly. Pair this with frequently changing (company-mandated) complex passwords and permanent lockut after a few mistypes and you have a recipe for disaster: Even some of my technologically less-inclined co-workers researched how to bypass Windows security with hacking tools.
I used to work at a nuclear energy services consultancy. I heard a story about how an energy think-tank had particular rooms with power-saving motion occupancy sensors for the lights. The problem was sitting still at a computer would result in the lights suddenly going off. An engineer solved this problem with a drinking bird toy with a warm bowl of water right at the level of the sensor.
If you want users to adopt secure practices then you have to lower the amount of friction. Adding a fingerprint reader or some other kind of biometrick unlocking capability would probably help.
A better example: I think on macOS the system can be setup to automatically lock and unlock by wearing an Apple Watch.
The users aren't the ones that have to be trained, it's the flawed security practices that need to be fixed.
For those with a Mac and an Apple Watch you can make the watch automatically lock and unlock based on Bluetooth distance.
I deployed WHfB at our $LARGE_ENTERPRISE and opted against using BT RSSI as a trusted signal because it's just too unpredictable. Probably because the Windows space is much more varied, but an RSSI that'd work for one device at ~8' away would fail to lock another when two cube rows away. Meaning, we knew users would start to depend on it, but it wouldn't work as they thought.
Thus, still policies of locking machines, it's now just easier to unlock. (And arguably more secure because now less password typing means far fewer chances for keyloggers to get network-usable credentials.)
Which RDP client were you using? And did you disable the password provider (leaving just the WHfB factors)?
And you had full Windows Hello for Business? (This one: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/identity-p...)
Or, were you using standard Hello? (The two are similarly named, but are quite different under the covers.)
Can't it be required by a group policy?
Also - in the office if you leave your computer unlocked you may find that you have emailed the team and promised to bring everybody doughnuts tomorrow.
Hahah, nice! That's an awesome office. :D
Note that I have face ID disabled because I got really fed up of my computer unlocking itself just because I'd gone back to my desk to pick up something I'd forgotten when I locked it and walked away. This always seemed incredibly insecure to me, not to mention very annoying.
What exactly do you mean by "swiping up"? Are you using Win10 on a tablet?
Can you provide anything else on this, rather than just casually claiming one of the most popular OSes has a massive security bug?
It happens infrequently enough that the first handful of times I thought I must have just forgotten to lock the machine. Eventually I realised that wasn't so and I wasn't just imagining it because, of course, by this time I'd become ultra-paranoid about locking the thing.
I'm running a ~2 year old Dell XPS equipped with a touchscreen. It's a decent machine for my needs but nothing special or exotic, and certainly I can't see any reason why this would be an issue.
I don't know what else to tell you other than I wish I was making it up.
As I said in another comment, the first few times I thought I must simply have forgotten to lock the machine. But of course then I became paranoid about locking the machine and so when it continued to happen from time to time I realised something really wasn't quite right.
Like I say though, it's just not behaviour I can reproduce on demand - super annoying.
It's most likely some quirk of my machine configuration, or possibly a driver issue (though I tend to like to keep things up to date), but I have a super-unadventurous Dell XPS so it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
FWIW, this was a somewhat buggy install of Windows 10 (Settings->Devices->Add a Bluetooth device would crash reliably), so I don't particularly expect this to be widespread/reproducible.
I don't remember ever experiencing it with other machines but the reality is that since 2015 I've only actually used Windows 10 with three other computers:
1. A Dell desktop machine with no touchscreen or camera back in 2016,
2. My Macbook Pro, in 2016/17, where I used Windows 10 as a Parallels VM,
3. An Intel powered Surface laptop that I used at work from 2017 - 2019.
I don't remember any issues with the desktop machine. With the Mac I used the OSX screen lock so it was a complete non-issue (of course Windows would still lock itself but I wasn't careful about locking it manually).
The Surface was so wrought with glitches and problems that the lock screen not working properly would have been the absolute least of them. It was one of the worst and least reliable computers I've ever had to tolerate, bested in this regard only by my ZX Spectrum 48K+ back in 1986/87, and the Spectrum +2A that followed it in 1988/89. An awful, overpriced, underspecced paperweight of a computer. Avoid.
Pull the smart card out, and the device locks. Most people do a good job of taking the card with them, from what I've seen. Although it can be a pain in the ass when you have to resize windows or enter the card pin ~3 times to get logged back in.
Though, I admit, if I'm working late and I'm the only one left in the building then I don't lock the computer.
I'd imagine many computer uses don't know how to lock their computers if they weren't taught by IT - many "obvious" things to a tech savvy person are unknown by your average office worker (you can't imagine how many people I've taught to use CTRL+F)
Also, the shortcut is Windows Key+L.
And then it calms down and all is well unless the cable decides not to connect at full speed, and I get to cycle it.
Win+L.
This may be because I've always hated the windows key, and would sometimes seek out keyboards that didn't have one.