It’s not theatre, it’s real security. And state level actors are absolutely not the only one capable of man in the middle attacks.

You have:

- employees at ISPs

- employees at the hosting company

- accidental network misconfigurations

- one of your own compromised machines now part of a ransomware group

- the port you thought was “just for internal” that a dev now opens for some quick testing from a dev box

Putting anything in open comms is one of the dumbest things you can do as an engineer. Do your job and clean that shit up.

It’s funny you mention risk analysis, plaintext traffic is one of the easiest things to compromise.