Years ago at a large car manufacturer I had an argument with the "Data Security" team about firewall settings. They had some crazy dumb ideas of what had to be

Years ago at a large car manufacturer I had an argument with the "Data Security" team about firewall settings. They had some crazy dumb ideas of what had to be on the firewall and it was constantly causing us pain. I went to visit this person in charge and argue my case. He was in another building outside of the "Secure Datacenter".. He argued with me for about 45 mins about how nothing leaves that data center and the firewall is our last line of defense. I pulled a 5Gb 8mm tape out of my pocket, dropped it on his desk and said "That's a copy of every single customer in our database and our entire parts catalog with all order history so much for your firewall". The next day we had more intelligent discussions about firewall settings, and permissions on the mainframe for tape backups... Additionally my favorite trick to this day when visiting a company is just plugging in a laptop to various random ethernet ports. I was recently as at a place where they have a "Guest Wifi" that changes passwords every week and the password is emailed to everyone. Sitting in a random conference room I plugged in and had 100% access to their corporate network. In today's work of IOT this is basically gross negligence to only rely on a firewall for security. To think a firewall is much protection at all is to stick your head in the sand and pretend everything is ok.