this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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Malicious Compliance

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People conforming to the letter, but not the spirit, of a request.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/IntelligentKitchen77 on 2025-06-06 15:01:46+00:00.


I work in internal IT support for a midsize firm. Our new Director of Compliance is extremely paranoid about cybersecurity. One morning, she issued a blanket policy: “All internal emails must be in plain text only. No HTML, no links, no formatting, no embedded images.”

I warned her this would make our automated reports unreadable, our internal ticketing system buggy, and would break calendar invites. She snapped: “Security takes precedence. Make it work.”

You got it.

I reconfigured our team’s email to use only plain text. The next day, her daily system reports came in looking like this:

yaml CopyEdit

Ticket #2932 User: jsmith Issue: cannot login Resolution: password reset

Status: closed

Ticket #2933 User: [REDACTED] Issue: [REDACTED] Status: [REDACTED]

Why redacted? Because she blocked all formatting and image links — including our redaction tool which used inline images. She also missed a compliance deadline because her calendar invite came through as:

makefile CopyEdit

BEGIN:VCALENDAR BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY: Quarterly Audit DTSTART;TZID=EST:20240503T130000 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR

Two days later, she reversed the policy. Quietly. I never said a word.

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