Ask HN: What tools to use for a political party IT infrastructure?

6 points by greencore 5 years ago | 5 comments

Hi HN, I'm trying to establish a new IT infrastructure for my political party (leftist). Would you recommend any tools for it?

maltalex 5 years ago |

In this day and age, I'd recommend consulting with actual security professional for organizations as public as political parties.

Short of that, make sure to (at least) cover the basics:

- Ask everyone to use a trusted password manager and strong, unique password for everything. Avoid shared accounts and shared passwords.

- Enable 2FA everywhere, strongly prefer authentication apps or even better, hardware tokens over SMS. Use SMS 2FA only as a last resort.

- Have everyone go through cyber security awareness training. Many attacks start off as (spear) phishing emails and/or various social engineering shenanigans.

- Update every piece of software obsessively. That includes everything from workstations and phones to servers, VPNs, routers and printers. Do not use any device which isn't supported anymore.

probinso 5 years ago |

Use NextCloud.

It's going to be worth doing threat modeling for different things, but a lot of operational problems can be solved with this and it is self-hosted

speedgoose 5 years ago |

Probably not AWS if your party don't like Amazon.

pestaa 5 years ago | |

It could be somewhat hypocritical to use big cloud providers if the party is heavily anti-corporate, but even then... who cares?

You can very well be in favor of regulating companies whose services you rely on, and accept the consequently increased bills.

speedgoose 5 years ago | | |

I would guess a few people would care. A journalist or two.

No regulation doesn't necessarily mean lower bills. Look at the fortune of Jeff Bezos.