I keep hearing that often on HN, however I've personally never seen seen such demands from insurers. I would greatly appreciate if one share such insurance policy. Insurance policies are not trade secrets and OK to be public. I can google plenty of commercial cars insurance policies for example.
https://retail.direct.zurich.ch/resources/definition/product...
Questionnaire Zurich Cyber Insurance
Question 4.2: "Do you have a technically enforced password policy that ensures use of strong passwords and that passwords are changed at least quarterly?"
Since this is an insurance questionnaire, presumably your answers to that question affect the rates you get charged?
(Found that with the help of o4-mini https://chatgpt.com/share/680bc054-77d8-8006-88a1-a6928ab99a...)
I just cant imagine any outcome other than it was translated to just a "no" and increased your premium over what it would have otherwise been.
Totally bonkers stuff.
Eliminating everything but a business's industry specific apps, MS Office, and some well-known productivity tools slashes support calls (no customization!) and frustrates cyberattacks to some degree when you can't deploy custom executables.
In around 2011, the Defence Signals Directorate (now the Australian Signals Directorate) went through and did an analysis of all of the intrusions they had assisted with over the previous few years. It turned out that app whitelisting, patching OS vulns, patching client applications (Office, Adobe Reader, browsers), and some basis permission management would have prevented something like 90% of them.
The "Top 4" was later expanded to the Essential Eight which includes additional elements such as backups, MFA, disabling Office macros and using hardened application configs.
https://www.cyber.gov.au/resources-business-and-government/e...
At first glance that might seem a poor move for corporate information security. But crucially, the security of cloud webapps is not the windows sysadmins' problem - buck successfully passed.
It's about the transition from artisanal hand-configuration to mass-produced fleet standards, and diverting exceptional behavior and customizations somewhere else.
Alice is on Discord because half of the products the company uses now give more or less direct access to their devs through Discord
You install software via ticket requests to IT, and devs might have admin rights, but not root, and only temporary.
This is nothing new though, back in the timesharing days, where we would connect to the development server, we only got as much rights as required for the ongoing development workflows.
Hence why PCs felt so liberating.
Just wait when more countries keep adopting cybersecurity laws for companies liabilities when software doesn't behave, like in any other engineering industry.
A breach can turn out into enough money being lost, in credibility, canceled orders, or lawsuits, big enough to close shop, or having to fire those that thought security rules were dumb.
Also anyone with security officer title, in many countries has legal responsibilities when something goes wrong, so when they sign off software deliverables that go wrong, is their signature on the approval.
The worst part about cyber insurance, though, is that as soon as you declare an incident, your computers and cloud accounts now belong to the insurance company until they have their chosen people rummage through everything. Your restoration process is now going to run on their schedule. In other words, the reason the recovery from a crypto-locker attack takes three weeks is because of cyber insurance. And to be fair, they should only have to pay out once for a single incident, so their designated experts get to be careful and meticulous.
Fear of a prospective expectation, compliance, requirement, etc., even when that requirement does not actually exist is so prevalent in the personality types of software developers.
My mental model at this point says that if there's a cost to some important improvement, the politics and incentives today are such that a typical executive will only do the bare minimum required by law or some equivalent force, and not a dollar more.