Would the steps I describe prevent actions taken in the GitLab incident? I would never make no assumptions to that. Maybe. Maybe not. Did I say following those steps would make it unlikely to happen to you? No. That's why I prefaced it with "I'm not a sysadmin." Would it prevent cases described by the person I was responding to? Absolutely. Not 100% of the time, but some percentage of the time.
So, I'll say it more clearly, and you can mark my words. It's unlikely I'll ever log into a production system, type the wrong command, and do something bad as a result.
Could I deploy code that does very bad things to production? Yes. It'll probably happen to me. Is that the situation described above? No.
I treat logging into a production system as if one wrong move could result in me losing my job. Why? Because one wrong move could result in me losing my job. I'm not joking when I say I avoid logging into a production system like the plague. It's unlikely to happen to me because its extremely rare for me to put myself in a situation where I could let this happen. There's almost always better alternatives that I'll resort to, well before doing anything like this.
So, I'll say it more clearly, and you can mark my words. It's unlikely I'll ever log into a production system, type the wrong command, and do something bad as a result.
Could I deploy code that does very bad things to production? Yes. It'll probably happen to me. Is that the situation described above? No.
I treat logging into a production system as if one wrong move could result in me losing my job. Why? Because one wrong move could result in me losing my job. I'm not joking when I say I avoid logging into a production system like the plague. It's unlikely to happen to me because its extremely rare for me to put myself in a situation where I could let this happen. There's almost always better alternatives that I'll resort to, well before doing anything like this.