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We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

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Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#181

Post by vidarh »

ralferoo wrote: post #179
hamdingers wrote: post #9

I worked at a company that had effectively no physical security during work hours until the second time someone came in during lunch and stole an armload of laptops. Then we got card readers and a staffed front desk, and discovered our snack budget was too high because people from other companies on other floors were coming to ours for snacks too. I never felt the office was insecure, except in retrospect once it was…

I once worked at a place where the receptionist held the door open for a thief who made off with about 10 PCs, taken from random work desks near the entrance. She thought that because he was wearing a suit and a badge from his "company" that he must have been supposed to be there, and assumed he was probably taking the computers away to be fixed. There was surprisingly little repercussion for violating the "one card…

> There was surprisingly little repercussion for violating the "one card one person" door policy

Presumably because "everyone" knows that "noone" complies with those policies, in part because it's socially awkward to e.g. close the door on someone who tries to tailgate, and so it needs to be heavily and consistently enforced before it becomes more socially unacceptable to be the person who potentially puts their colleagues at risk of disciplinary actions than to be the person who tells someone they need to swipe.

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#182

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

RobotToaster wrote: post #168
lenkite wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not actually the extreme punishments, it's the consistent small punishments. Not just the consistent small punishments, but the painful punishments. Pain is an extremely good, human motivator. Why destroy someones life and spend valuable taxpayer money with a 10 year imprisonment, when a rigorous caning session will be 10x more effective ? Many criminals will loudly thump their chest if punishment is merely ja…

I guess Singapore doesn't have a lot of masochists?

Like this?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XB7R0ZxNgC4

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#183

Post by SomeUserName432 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #40
hamdingers wrote: post #9

I worked at a company that had effectively no physical security during work hours until the second time someone came in during lunch and stole an armload of laptops. Then we got card readers and a staffed front desk, and discovered our snack budget was too high because people from other companies on other floors were coming to ours for snacks too. I never felt the office was insecure, except in retrospect once it was…

How the fuck nobody notices some randoms coming to steal snacks in the first place ?

Feels like every time I drop by the office there's 2-3 new faces I've never seen before.

People I know seems to not take issue with them being there, so I'm sure it's probably fine. Fine enough for it not to be my issue to deal with in any case.

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#184

Post by account42 »

khafra wrote: post #165
halapro wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't people feel anxious all the time? I do when I visit certain places like Singapore, where any misstep feels illegal.

I spent a few days in Singapore, long ago. I felt slightly anxious, but mostly because I wasn't familiar with the rules. I'm confident that, if I spent a year or two there, I would quickly become far less anxious than in other places--because the rules are so clear and consistently enforced. The less of a judgement call is involved, the less there is to be uncertain about. Think about it: Is it better to have a poste…

The point of poster a lower speed limit than what is applied is because both the sensors used by the police and in your card are inaccurate and it's unreasonable to constantly fine people who thought (and perhaps even were) within the limit.

And this applies to most other laws too - we can't expect everyone to know all the edge cases so some leniency for honest mistakes is needed.

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#185

Post by joshstrange »

ralferoo wrote: post #179
hamdingers wrote: post #9

I worked at a company that had effectively no physical security during work hours until the second time someone came in during lunch and stole an armload of laptops. Then we got card readers and a staffed front desk, and discovered our snack budget was too high because people from other companies on other floors were coming to ours for snacks too. I never felt the office was insecure, except in retrospect once it was…

I once worked at a place where the receptionist held the door open for a thief who made off with about 10 PCs, taken from random work desks near the entrance. She thought that because he was wearing a suit and a badge from his "company" that he must have been supposed to be there, and assumed he was probably taking the computers away to be fixed. There was surprisingly little repercussion for violating the "one card…

I once worked for a company that had a bad habit of not announcing employee departures (for both firing or quitting). At one point they let the VP of sales go and told practically no one. It came out that he was no longer with the company in an All Company meeting, not even on purpose. Someone asked “Where is X?” and the CEO was like “they are no longer with the company”.

After that I lobbied, successfully but not easily, to have them send out an email that just said “X is no longer with the company” regardless of how/why they left.

The “winning” argument was that if that VP had emailed me (or probably any of the developers) and asked for an export of data (our client list, stats, etc) we would have sent it to him. Probably even with him reaching out from a personal email address or via sms. What IC is going to tell a VP to “follow procedure”? Same deal with if he had followed me to the keycard door and told me he forgot his key card. No one is going to thank the IC who tells the VP they can’t let them in.

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#186

Post by XorNot »

inigyou wrote: post #155
XorNot wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they? The goal isn't to draw a hard boundary it's to create layered defenses which increase the difficulty and reduce opportunity. If instead of open access you need to tailgate on a limited set of employees, that increases difficulty considerably and makes the opportunity much less common. Real security analysis works this way: you don't assume you can build a wall which is never breached.

Deviant Ollam talked about elevators a lot. You can have the fire marshal's key or an elevator technician's key and know where the secret panel is to override the controls on any elevator, take it to any floor you want, or even between floors, or tag it out of order and hide in there until everyone else goes home. Any elevator shaft should be treated like a door to the outside world, you never know who could come in…

You're missing the part about layered controls which is what elevator access control is.

Limiting the number of people who can incidentally travel to and loiter outside your primary office entrance is one level of control - it raises the visiibility of interlopers, and creates an initial barrier to even being near the objective.

Everything else you've listed though is also just a big list of additional breaches and crimes someone would have to commit before they can even get near to the target in the first place - i.e. they're relevant, but if you're ingress plan is "steal a bunch of elevator access keys" then you've already excluded a whole host of simple crimes of opportunity.

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#187

Post by bschwarz »

lenkite wrote: post #170
RobotToaster wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess Singapore doesn't have a lot of masochists?

Even Masochists have a limit to Pain Tolerance. Unless you are talking about 1-in-a-billion "Ironman" guy with dead nerves or someone totally drugged, the overwhelming majority of human beings cannot last beyond the 10th stroke at the maximum without begging for mercy. Singapore's judicial caning officers (jokingly called "commandos") are trained to deliver strokes in a way that inflicts MAXIMUM pain while staying wi…

Considering caning often creates scars I don't see how it avoids permanent injury.

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#188

Post by animal531 »

bombcar wrote: post #77
PunchyHamster wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How the fuck nobody notices some randoms coming to steal snacks in the first place ?

There's a huge difference between a company with its own building, and a company that shares a building in some way with other companies. Many I've seen have it setup so that if you get past the security guard at the lobby, you effectively had full reign of the entire building, including many companies that wouldn't lock the doors or common areas.

In the early 2000's I worked at a company where our IT section was in its own building with only about 18-24 or so people spread out over three mostly open plan areas between development, testing and infrastructure.

Even so we still had an incident where two guys walked in and just collected a few laptops before making their escape.

We like to think that we are hyper-vigilant and intelligent as human beings, but in general we tend to just focus on what is in front of us most of the time. We assume that when things are happening that they must be ordinary, or else why would they be happening?

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#189

Post by donatj »

There was an active shooter in our area a number of years ago and they locked the building down. No one was injured, it was a domestic dispute in a neighborhood a few blocks away. The police caught the guy hiding in some bushes.

In response to the perceived need to "do something", my company put cameras in the hallway we share with other companies and gave the receptionist monitors for the cameras and a panic button that locks all the doors.

It's not a terrible thing, it's largely security theater though. Someone would have to be clearly brandishing a weapon and our receptionist would have to notice this amongst all her other duties and out of all the people in the hall. It could happen, but it seems unlikely.

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#190

Post by inigyou »

XorNot wrote: post #186
inigyou wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deviant Ollam talked about elevators a lot. You can have the fire marshal's key or an elevator technician's key and know where the secret panel is to override the controls on any elevator, take it to any floor you want, or even between floors, or tag it out of order and hide in there until everyone else goes home. Any elevator shaft should be treated like a door to the outside world, you never know who could come in…

You're missing the part about layered controls which is what elevator access control is. Limiting the number of people who can incidentally travel to and loiter outside your primary office entrance is one level of control - it raises the visiibility of interlopers, and creates an initial barrier to even being near the objective. Everything else you've listed though is also just a big list of additional breaches and c…

You can buy elevator keys for not much money on eBay.
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