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mitm surveillance of employee traffic is basically a cornerstone of enterprise security since those networks are designed to be very squishy on the inside. Than

mitm surveillance of employee traffic is basically a cornerstone of enterprise security since those networks are designed to be very squishy on the inside. Thankfully Google is turning the assumption that the perimeter needs to extend to your rather vulnerable clients on its head but that will be several years before it's productized enough that middle managers will be convinced to buy it by a VAR over a game of golf.

fulafel 10y ago
Highly culture and jurisdiction dependent. Many places ban this with some narrow exceptions (defense sector etc) in law and/or binding labour org agreements.
ChoHag 10y ago
That's basically putting the cart before the horse. Security is hard. Hard problems are easier when there are fewer of them. It's easier to build one big wall than lots of little ones. Surveillance of employees is a cornerstone of enterprise security because humans are inherently untrustworthy. One part of the solution to this problem is to define a distinction (using golf[+] of all things as an analogy) between the rough, the fairway and the green. Because defining a border between the rough and the course is easy, and untrustworthy humans aren't all that bad most of the time, the distinction between the fairway and the green easily becomes blurred. While employers may polish up the distinction between their workaday desktops and their locked-down servers they will never abandon the difference, and nor should they, between their systems and everyone else's systems. [+] You have my permission to use this analogy with your manglers.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  Just to be clear I'm referring to monitoring traffic for security threats. Not for things like stealing source code or applying for jobs or whatever BS some employers are paranoid about. The reason it's a cornerstone is because your clients, especially laptops, are huge gaping attack vectors. They visit other networks and browse the web. Even if they're browsing the web 100% of the time through a web proxy it's not going to catch everything. And it's for that same reason Google decided to shrink their perimeter. The distinction between their systems and someone else's is still maintained, but they've accepted and embraced the fact that the laptops used by their employees can and will get owned. So instead of acting as a bridge between the internet and internal squishy networks they sit out there with the internet. But I'm hardly doing the concept justice. In fact I'm probably hurting it more than helping it. If you haven't read it Google discusses the security concepts in a short paper you can get here: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43231.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43231.html

fulafel 10y ago

Highly culture and jurisdiction dependent. Many places ban this with some narrow exceptions (defense sector etc) in law and/or binding labour org agreements.

ChoHag 10y ago

That's basically putting the cart before the horse. Security is hard. Hard problems are easier when there are fewer of them. It's easier to build one big wall than lots of little ones. Surveillance of employees is a cornerstone of enterprise security because humans are inherently untrustworthy. One part of the solution to this problem is to define a distinction (using golf[+] of all things as an analogy) between the rough, the fairway and the green. Because defining a border between the rough and the course is easy, and untrustworthy humans aren't all that bad most of the time, the distinction between the fairway and the green easily becomes blurred. While employers may polish up the distinction between their workaday desktops and their locked-down servers they will never abandon the difference, and nor should they, between their systems and everyone else's systems. [+] You have my permission to use this analogy with your manglers.

brazzledazzle 10y ago
Just to be clear I'm referring to monitoring traffic for security threats. Not for things like stealing source code or applying for jobs or whatever BS some employers are paranoid about. The reason it's a cornerstone is because your clients, especially laptops, are huge gaping attack vectors. They visit other networks and browse the web. Even if they're browsing the web 100% of the time through a web proxy it's not going to catch everything. And it's for that same reason Google decided to shrink their perimeter. The distinction between their systems and someone else's is still maintained, but they've accepted and embraced the fact that the laptops used by their employees can and will get owned. So instead of acting as a bridge between the internet and internal squishy networks they sit out there with the internet. But I'm hardly doing the concept justice. In fact I'm probably hurting it more than helping it. If you haven't read it Google discusses the security concepts in a short paper you can get here: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43231.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43231.html