Security through being a pain in the ass

[andrewducker]

I was conversing (via email) with channelpenguin about a problem I was working on in C#, and wasn't managing to make myself entirely clear, so I decided to email over the test project I was working with for her to take a look at. So I zipped up the folder, attached it to an email, and hit send.

And got an instant reply from our outgoing mail server saying "This has an EXE in it.  You can't send these without talking to the IT security department."

Remembering the last conversation with them that I'd had about this kind of problem, I recreated the zip file, this time with encryption turned on, so that our outgoing email server would ignore its contents, and hit send again.

And got an instant reply from _her_ outgoing mail server saying "This has an encrypted ZIP file attached.  You can't send these without talking to our IT security department."

On the one hand, I'm very glad that our respective security departments are protecting us from ourselves, but good grief, they certainly make it tricky to send things back and forth.

Comments

[odheirre.livejournal.com]

What I've done is remove the extension or change it to .txt. That fools a lot of mail programs, surprisingly.

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

Tried an encrypted rar, or GPG? Or, for that matter, getting her to pull if off your userspace directly, via samba?

[andrewducker]

We work at different companies....

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Well, I got it anyway, in the end - what did you do?

I usually go for changing the extension - works most times.

[andrewducker]

I remembered that you didn't need the exe - you just needed the source code...

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

Changing the file extension deffo works with our firewall. I do it all the time since it's the nature of my job to fix all the guff you developers churn out and the easiest way to deliver the new exe to software dist is often via E-Mail