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Comment by cadamsdotcom

3 hours ago

I'm very sorry, but you can't blame a hammer for how it was used. You can't be blaming Tailscale for a customer's misconfigured setup.

I don’t think anyone blame tailscale here. They are doing the right thing by going the extra mile and reflect on what could have been done better

You know how I know you didn't read the article?

You can't blame a hammer hurting a user when they were being stupid, but if the default configuration of the hammer is to be made of a material that can bounce back with force and stick in the users forehead then some reengineering may be needed.

That's what this article is about. Better configurations and defense in depth. This is actually a wonderful position for the company to think about and take.

  • It's an interesting balance for a company to strike. Networking in general is one where the defaults are almost always lax. Why? Because the vast majority of support tickets for these companies are from people who don't know what they are doing and don't have a desire to understand. They "just want it to work."

    But the people with the actual desire and understanding aren't using the defaults anyway. And the people who don't want to understand will just turn things off and "just get it working."

    The only way out of this is extreme accountability and intentional design from person implementing the technology.

Your mindset is the exact one responsible for these kinds of issues. Cybersecurity is as much a design and psychology problem as it is a technical one. The freaking article goes into detail about the dangers of defaults.

  • This really isn't a tailscale specific compromise at all. If your private key store or credential store to any tool is compromised, particularly if those credentials can be used to automate standing up new network connections/services, you've got other problems.