> The problem is that the demand isn't being made by security professionals, it's being made by risk management people
I'm actually not sure how true this is. There is a huge "security checklist" industry backed by persons with some fancy Security title that provide security analysis checklists for companies to follow, often citing very interesting interpretations of best practices from actual security orgs. These checklists are pushed on regulators who likely lack any ability to assess the validity of such requirements, rubber stamp the checklists into regulations, and now you have a series of unenforceable or ridiculous security policies and practices that basically serve to frustrate the user while failing to prevent actual attacks.
I've been at companies where there were rather interesting policies like
- Three factor authentication (because a single method isn't enough for some reason)
- No password managers allowed (how this is enforced is completely unknown)
- 6 week password lifetime
- Past password similarity checking (I'm actually not even sure how they do this unless they somehow have access to the plaintext version of user passwords; if there's a benign/secure way of doing this I'd be very curious)
- Random character requirements/limitations (you must use non-letter characters from set X, but not from set Y, and absolutely only latin letters)
And those are just some of the bangers surrounding password policies; the less said about the network security policies and antivirus policies the better.
And these requirements don't come from some regulation/risk assessment group; they're enforced by such groups, but the actual requirements come from some security firm that sell lists and a stamp of approval once you have every box checked.
It's difficult to not look at such firms as swindlers with a guaranteed paycheck from a captive audience; they sell their services to regulators as a benchmark to meet, and then in turn they sell implementation services to companies that are forced to meet said regulations.
And the end result is just extremely frustrated users who still end up falling for "Hey Bob check this out" phishing emails which is plenty for an attacker to get in and jump around your network until they compromise enough of the environment to take the business down. But hey! The business followed the checklist, so they can't be held liable for exfiltrated data!