I can't believe that came from your mouth!
You’re Fired!
You’ve Got Questions? We’ve Got Pink Slips
Aug 30th
My wife and I were strolling along the street the other day window shopping and we passed a Radio Shack. She wondered aloud “When will Radio Shack go out of business?”
I replied, “They are working on it.”
Radio Shack fired 400 people today. By Email. Burn.
From the AP here:
FORT WORTH, Texas – RadioShack Corp. notified about 400 workers by e-mail that they were being dismissed immediately as part of planned job cuts.
Employees at the Fort Worth headquarters got messages Tuesday morning saying: “The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.”
Derrick D’Souza, a management professor at the University of North Texas, said he had never heard of such a large number of terminated employees being notified electronically. He said it could be seen as dehumanizing to employees.
I remember when Tandy used to own Radio Shack. It was cool. You could go in and buy rawhide and a CB radio at the same time.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!)
Loading ...Mitnick’s Site Gets Owned
Aug 21st
A defacement crew from Pakistan targeted “notorious” hacker Kevin Mitnick’s website and replaced his homepages with screeds and taunts. Kevin Mitnick was the first high profile criminal to go to jail for crimes on the internet in 1995. Now he is out of jail and is trying to make a living at speaking engagements and other events where he hypes his criminal background and pretends to be a security expert.
From CNET here:
Instead of the usual description of Kevin Mitnick, his consulting services and books, the famed hacker’s Web site on Sunday displayed a vulgar message.
Online vandals, apparently operating from Pakistan, broke into the computer hosting Mitnick’s Web site on Sunday and replaced his front page with one of their own. As a result, four Web addresses belonging to Mitnick, including KevinMitnick.com and MitnickSecurity.com, displayed an explicit message on Mitnick and hacking.
Mitnick’s name is synonymous with “notorious hacker” for many. He was caught by the FBI in 1995 after a well-publicized pursuit and spent five years behind bars for wire and computer fraud. Today he is a consultant, has written two books, and spends much of his time on the road at speaking engagements.
“The attackers from Pakistan took over that whole box. There were a whole bunch of customers, including myself, but my site was the only one defaced, so I was probably the target,” Mitnick said. The server was taken offline to be reinstalled, Mitnick said. The Web site was still offline as of late Monday afternoon Pacific Time.
Defacing Web sites is akin to graffiti in the brick-and-mortar world. “It is kind of stupid, they do it for the attention,” Mitnick said. “When I was a hacker, I never stooped to defacing sites because that was more like vandalism, that wasn’t any fun. It is more about getting in and being stealth and looking around and exploring.”
Yeah, defacements arent fun, but they sure are embarrassing. They tend to show that an organization is sloppy, especially if the defacement was due to a misconfiguration.
The copy of the defacement is here:
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Things Not to Write in Email
Aug 20th
It seems that two Female Employees in Germany’s Unemployement Office were commisserating with each other via email about how their lovers were not showing any interest in them. They went on and on about how even shaving their privates sparked very little interest.
It seems that on the final reply, one of the employees, somehow, clicked a button to send the email to the entire Bureau.
Eveyone was laughing and someone of course posted it on the internet. If you can read German, the whole email is here.
From Reuters here:
BERLIN (Reuters) – Two German women complaining on office email about their partners’ poor sex drive found the details of their private lives broadcast to thousands after one of them hit the wrong button, Bild newspaper said Saturday.
“Everyone stares at us now and whispers behind our backs,” Anica G., a 21-year-old worker at the Federal Labor Office, told Bild.
The emails between Anica and colleague Christina S., with descriptions on how the women try but fail to arouse their partners, were first sent by accident to other colleagues in their department at the Labor Office.
They were then forwarded to thousands throughout the Labor Office and other government agencies and widely distributed by recipients to people across Germany.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...The Abyssmal Depths of Loser Canyon
Aug 11th
There are losers, and there are real losers. And then there are those that descend into the bowels of Loser Canyon with a pickaxe and a shovel and start digging deeply into the bitter dirt of Loser Goodness.
Meet Bruno Moore. He’s the guy with the Pickaxe and shovel.
Bruno has bounced around south Florida taking some pretty cruddy jobs and trying to break into the news and radio biz. He was a substitute teacher. He reported the traffic from a helicopter. And he worked as a DJ at a country music station. His wife is finished with him and was in the process of ridding herself of him with divorce proceedings.
But like many low life DJ’s, he trolls the request lines looking for women that just want to hook up with someone slightly famous. This would have been okay, if it wasnt a 13 year old girl that he tried to hook up with.
From the Palm Beach Post here:
Bruno Moore, a former South Florida television news traffic reporter, country music station disc jockey and newly hired Martin County teacher, was arrested Tuesday for allegedly trying to seduce a 13-year-old girl online, investigators said.
Moore, 34, gave a full confession, admitting he’d had sexually explicit online and phone chats with her, though he knew she was underage, according to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.
Moore’s involvement with the 13-year-old began innocently enough. She wanted to hear a Carrie Underwood song, probably Jesus, Take the Wheel, on WIRK 107.9 FM, the country music station in Palm Beach County where Moore worked part time as a disc jockey, Collins said.
The girl typed a note to an instant message account the station uses to get song requests from listeners, investigators said. Moore saw her message and kept the girl’s screen name.
When she called in to make a request, he had a sexually explicit chat with her and began sending explicit messages to her online, Collins said.
Moore has a 5-year-old son and is going through a divorce, Collins said.
Moore also no longer is employed at WIRK, said Lee Strasser, the station’s general manager.
See the great video on the local news in Palm Beach here. You can see his personal Website here on Tripod.
He is held without bond. His wife will certainly get custody now, and Moore will have to register as a sex offender.
This is also a very happy story for the mother of the young girl who Moore was trying to solicit. She knew what her daughter was doing online and made sure that her child was safe.
But what was the little girl doing with a MySpace account? I thought those were restricted to people over the age of 14?
Hat tip to Trench for the story.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Ex-Employee Leeches Emails
Aug 10th
A man fired from his job used his credentials to tap into his former company’s email system and forward emails from his coworker to his home. Its kinda like the way George Costanza left behind a briefcase with a tape recorder in it, but this way the employee faces a stiff fine and jail time.
From the Newswire:
A Utah man has been charged for illegally intercepting the e-mail of two officials at his former employer, a high-technology company in Salt Lake City, the Justice Department announced today.
William K. Dobson, 55, of Salt Lake City has been charged in a three-count criminal indictment, two for intercepting electronic communications and a third for illegally obtaining information from a protected computer.
The indictment alleges that Dobson had worked for a high- technology company that he had helped co-found and in which he remained a minority stockholder. After Dobson left the company over business and financial disagreements, he surreptitiously accessed the company’s e-mail system on two occasions to insert instructions that would intercept the electronic mail of the company’s chief executive officer and its vice president of engineering and send them to a new, unauthorized e-mail inbox that Dobson had created on the company’s system. The indictment further alleges that Dobson programmed his home computer to download these e-mails from the company for over a month, until his home was searched by the FBI in connection with this investigation. The indictment further alleges that Dobson read many of these e-mails, which included both business and personal information.
If convicted, Dobson faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison, to be followed by up to three years of supervised release, a fine of up to $250,000 or twice the monetary gain or loss, and restitution to the victims.
He thought he was being sneaky. But the old company was having none of it. They called in the big guns with the FBI and now Dobson is screwed.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Dept. of Transportation Screws Floridians
Aug 9th
An Inspector General with the Department of Transportation, who carries a gun as part of his job, neglected to secure his personal laptop that just so happened to contain the social security numbers of 133,000 residents of Florida.
What makes this worse is that the IG was in town to make sure that there were no terrorists registering to become pilots according to the letter that the Dept. of Transportation was sending out. So they collect all of the pilot information, and then promptly proceed to have it stolen by criminals. Sheesh. Incompetence.
From the WaPo here:
A laptop computer belonging to the federal Department of Transportation inspector general’s office was stolen last month, putting the sensitive personal information of nearly 133,000 Florida residents at risk, Acting Inspector General Todd J. Zinser said today.
The laptop, assigned to a special agent in the Miami office, was stolen from a government vehicle on July 27 in Doral, Fla., Zinser told Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) today in a letter obtained by The Washington Post.
The computer contains the names, Social Security numbers, birthdates and addresses of 42,792 Florida residents who hold a pilot’s license; 80,667 people in the Miami-Dade County area who hold commercial driver’s licenses; 9,496 people who took personal driver’s license tests or obtained their license from an examining facility near Tampa, the letter said.
“We regret this matter and take our responsibilities seriously,” Zinser wrote. “We have taken action and will continue to take steps necessary to prevent this from happening again.”
The department has posted information about the data breach, including a toll free number for the public to call, on its Web site. The theft is just the latest in a string of embarrassing data breaches reported by a wide variety of federal agencies.
Too bad about this laptop. If this could only happen at the end of next week, it would have its data encrypted per the new Federal Regulations. But I guess the Transportation Department was going to wait until the last minute. Sure, it was password protected, but that wouldnt stop disk copying software.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Grenade Plus Sledgehammer Equals
Aug 9th
Kaboom.
An idiot worker in a mechanical shop tried to open up a rocket propelled grenade with a sledgehammer. I somehow dont think that was the proper tool. He blows up his shop. The cars lining the street outside catch fire. But who was stupider? The mechanic, or his buddy that was crazy enough to work along side him?
No, not Peter Gabriel’s sledghammer. From Reuters here:
Man dies opening grenade with sledgehammer
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (Reuters) – A Brazilian man died on Tuesday when he tried to open what police believe was a rocket-propelled grenade with a sledgehammer in a mechanical workshop on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.
Another man who was in the workshop at the time of the explosion was rushed to a hospital with severe burns, a police officer told Reuters. The workshop was destroyed and several cars parked outside caught fire.
Police found several unexploded army issue rocket-propelled grenades in the workshop. They believe the ammunition had been brought there by scavengers wanting to sell them as scrap metal.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Fired by Text Message
Aug 7th
This is just another reason why it kinda sucks to be young in today’s high tech world. You have to work at a place called the “Blue Bannana” sticking sharp things in peoples’ belly buttons. And if you get sick and need to stay home, you get canned by SMS message on your cell phone.
From the AFP here:
U r sckd: worker fired by text message
LONDON (AFP) – A company has defended its decision to sack one of its staff by text message, claiming it was keeping in touch with youth culture.
Katy Tanner, a 21-year-old sales assistant, received the message while she was off work with a migraine, the South Wales Echo newspaper said Friday.
The text message said: “We will not require your services anymore…Thank you for your time with us.”
“I don’t think it’s right to just text someone. At least they should have talked to me face to face,” Tanner said.
“You’re not allowed to text in sick, you have to phone. The fact that they texted me is a bit of double standards.”
Several senior staff members at Blue Banana, a body-piercing and jewellery shop based in Cardiff, defended the decision.
The retailer claims it tried to reach Tanner directly “five or six times” and passed on a message through her boyfriend before the text was sent.
Blue Banana’s Website is here. In defense of the company, the type of people that work in these types of places are usually on the UK’s equivalent of welfare. In the UK, these people are called “Chavs” which translates to Jerry Springer white trash over here in the US. They dress in track suits with burberry striped hats, listen to hip hop, and rarely work, but receive hundreds of pounds per month for having children out of wedlock. I would love to fire them by text message too.
BTW, here is a dirty trick or just a way to have fun. You can go to Ipippi.com and text message your friends or enemies. Tell them that they are fired and watch the hilarity ensue.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...You Know When You Are a Bad Dog
Aug 3rd
When you get your photo on My Yahoo. This bad dog, named Barney, who was hired to guard a rare Teddy Bear, thought it would be fun to shred it.
From the AP here:
LONDON – A guard dog has ripped apart a collection of rare teddy bears, including one once owned by Elvis Presley, during a rampage at a children’s museum.
“He just went berserk,” said Daniel Medley, general manager of the Wookey Hole Caves near Wells, England, where hundreds of bears were chewed up Tuesday night by the 6-year-old Doberman pinscher named Barney.
Barney ripped the head off a brown stuffed bear once owned by the young Presley during the attack, leaving fluffy stuffing and bits of bears’ limbs and heads on the museum floor. The bear, named Mabel, was made in 1909 by the German manufacturer Steiff.
The collection, valued at more than $900,000, included a red bear made by Farnell in 1910 and a Bobby Bruin made by Merrythought in 1936.
A security guard at the museum, Greg West, said he spent several minutes chasing Barney before wrestling the dog to the ground.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...AO Hell
Aug 3rd
Deep cuts at Dulles Virginia’s offices today according to the WashingtonPost here. I have lots of friends that still work there. Its funny, but anyone in the industry has been amazed for the past 3 years with the onset of the broadband revolution that AOL can keep any customers at all. Sure, they have an excellent partnership program and some exclusive online content, but even that is not enough to lure anyone with broadband to their exclusive portal services.
So they apparently called a meeting today in which employees were also attending a webcast. They asked everyone to roll a D-4. Everyone who rolled a “one” got a pink slip.
Not really, but they may as well have.
AOL said today it plans to lay off more than a quarter of its workforce including hundreds of employees in Northern Virginia over the next six months as the company restructures its business to focus on online advertising instead of dial-up subscriptions.
In a meeting called this morning at the company’s Dulles headquarters, AOL chief executive Jonathan Miller told employees that 5,000 of the company’s 19,000 worldwide positions would be eliminated.
The news was hardly surprising, though, coming a day after AOL parent company Time Warner Inc. announced a major overhaul in AOL’s business strategy. AOL said yesterday that the company would give away much of its content, including aol.com e-mail addresses, for free on its Web site to customers who now pay for a broadband subscription. Customers who pay for dial-up access to the Internet through AOL will still be charged a monthly fee.
Miller addressed about 400 people gathered at the meeting, which was also viewed on a Web cast by employees overseas.
AOL has suffered as the business that it built around dial-up subscription service for access to the Internet dropped off as more people upgraded to broadband service.
As far as the cyber security industry goes, AOL should be careful to keep their security team intact. They have been recognized by the industry and by Homeland Security as having excellent visibility into online attacks and patterns, and they were leading the pack when it comes to ISP security. If they play their cards right, they could become an outstanding Managed Security Services Provider.
Or they could collect severence and get a job where there are no stick figures as corporate logos.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Randy Jennings: Another Pervert High School Coach
Jul 28th
What is up with High School Coaches getting caught for sending porn to kids? Meet Randy Jennings, a Tennis Coach at East Gaston High School in North Carolina. He is charged with being a pervert by sending pornographic images to what he thought was a 13 year old girl in Virginia.
From My Local News Station, NBC4 here:
GASTONIA, N.C. — Police say a North Carolina teacher is charged with Internet sex crimes, accused of e-mailing pornography to someone he thought was a 13-year-old girl in Virginia.
Randy Scott Jennings, a teacher and coach at East Gaston High School, was arrested Thursday at the school. He’s being held without bond in the county jail pending extradition to Virginia.
Jennings has also been suspended with pay by the school district pending an investigation.
Police in Chesterfield County, Va., said Jennings contacted a detective who was posing as a 13-year-old girl on the Internet about seven weeks ago. Another detective said the conversation soon became sexually explicit.
Authorities won’t identify the Web site where the two interacted, except to say it was a well-known Internet chat service.
Jennings is charged with attempted indecent liberties with a minor and using a communications device to solicit a minor, and distribution of child pornography.
If the courts in North Carolina refuse to let him out of jail, why the hell does the school system continue to pay his salary? Way to go, Randy. You will enjoy registering as a sex offender now that Adam Walsh Law is in effect.
Here is a story of another High School Pervert I wrote about.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Deloitte and Touche Screw Armstrong World Employees
Jul 27th
Deloitte and Touche (or is it toilet and douche?) got sloppy with customer data again. Just months after a D&T employee left a CDROM in the seatback pocket on an airplane, another D&T employee allows his laptop to get swiped from his car. Was this employee having drinks at a local pub when his laptop was stolen?
And how much crime is there up in Amish Lancaster, PA?
From the WaPo here:
LANCASTER, Pa. — A laptop stolen from a payroll auditor contains personal information on 12,000 current and former Armstrong World Industries Inc. employees, the company said.
The data include home addresses and phone numbers, Social Security numbers and how much the people were paid. A two-page letter sent by Armstrong last week said the company was not aware of any misuse of the information, and that a password was required to access the information on the computer.
The laptop was stolen from a locked car belonging to a Deloitte & Touche LLP employee, Armstrong said. Deborah G. Harrington, a spokeswoman for the consulting firm, declined to comment.
Armstrong advised employees to watch their bank accounts, credit cards, bills and financial statements for signs of unusual transactions. It also suggested that for three months they place a fraud alert on their credit files.
Lancaster-based Armstrong makes flooring, ceilings and cabinets.
Armstrong makes cabinets. Deloitte and Touch specializes in allowing personal data to be stolen. Will anyone be fired over this? Will anyone wise up and start using encryption on their laptops when dealing with private data?
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Superhero Office Space
Jul 20th
Since I was talking about superheroes earlier, I found this funny mashup on Youtube, courtesy of Digg, that has the Superfriends re-enacting the opening of Office Space.
Click on the photo or here to see the movie.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Hampton Screws its Residents
Jul 14th
No, they are not widening Interstate 64 yet again. No, they are not closing down Mercury Blvd. again. This time its a data breach.
As if having to live in Hampton Va isn’t bad enough sometimes, the city itself is putting all residents that are homeowners at risk of identity theft. And because the data is coupled with the plots, mortgage information and current residence, it is very easy for a hacker or other curious citizen to remortgage a Hampton resident’s house without the knowlege of the real home owner!
It appears that some genius in the titles department decided it would make sense to create a massive database and place it in the lobby so anyone can search on residential data. While this is common practice allowed under the law, the way it is supposed to work is that the information is available online, but personal information such as social security numbers are kept secret. Hampton has this database available already online. What you don’t do is put a secondary system in the lobby of the title office that includes all of the protected data.
Someone is going to be fired for this. And they may end up in jail too.
From the Daily Press here:
HAMPTON — Hampton’s treasurer and chief of police ripped a public computer out of the Hampton Circuit Court building Wednesday, after they found hundreds of Social Security numbers on display.
Police officers are breaking down the computer’s hard drive and trying to determine how many Social Security numbers were in the database and how many people had access to them. The computer appeared to include data on homeowners from across the city, but not everyone’s Social Security number.
During a 20-minute search late last week, a Daily Press reporter found and printed – for free – the full names, Social Security numbers and home addresses of a slew of prominent city officials and their spouses.
The computer had data on two General Assembly members, six City Council members, the mayor, city manager, treasurer, commissioner of the revenue and head of economic development. “This is one of the biggest IT (information technology) screw ups I’ve ever heard of,” said Commissioner of the Revenue Ross A. Mugler. “I’m in awe that this could happen. I’m really outraged.”
The computer was put in the court records building sometime early in 2002 to help title searchers go through public real estate records to make sure that no back taxes were left on a property. The clerk of court maintains a handful of other computers in the office, but the computer that was compromised held information from the treasurer’s office. Treasurer Molly Ward first heard about the breach around 2 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon.
“The instant anybody told me, I walked over there with the chief of police and we dismantled the thing ourselves,” Ward said. “We’re taking it very seriously. That’s why there is a criminal investigation.”
A nice video of this is located here.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...HUD Hires ID Theft Fraudster
Jul 11th
It appears that the Department of Housing and Urban Development do not perform extensive background checks on their high level employees. They should. One of their employees worked as the executive assistant to a Deputy Assitant Secretary and was using the office to harvest personal information to commit wire fraud, identity theft, mail fraud and was brokering in stolen credit cards.
And Tracyee Martan, aka Tracy McDaniel, was fired from the job and her computers confiscated to ascertain the extent of her fraudulent use of HUD information.
The Smoking Gun has full details of the report. The report details that Tracyee was also using another employee’s network login credentials for unknown reasons.
That alone can get you jail time, but if the other employee had access to even more sensitive information, the extent of the damage could be huge. HUD maintains sensitive information on many people for home mortgages.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Coke Employees Busted Selling Secrets to Pepsi
Jul 6th
This isn’t exactly a cyber story, but it does involve protecting information, so I’ve filed this one under cyber anyways. And I also used to work with Coke in information security. If there is another organization that takes security as seriously as Coca Cola does, I would like to know who it is.
The 100 year old secret formula for Coca Cola is under constant armed guard at the Headquarters. Every piece of written or printed information, from SEC filings to internal corporate memos are assigned a classification level. Cameras are everywhere. Every employee undergoes a rigorous background check. Coke only hires the very best in the field of security, both physical and electronic. Security specialists from Coke also work very closely with Homeland Security as advisors, and they maintain other private partnerships with security organizations to help shape the future of security. Literally, they write books on security and how to secure things.
All of this so they can sell water mixed with sugar.
Despite all of this security expertise, Coke suffered a breach when three employees colluded to steal corporate secrets and sell them to Pepsi for 1.5 million bucks. The thieves were stupid, however, in that they presumed incorrectly that Pepsi was in the business of buying stolen secrets. Pepsi wanted no part in this plot and instantly turned the stolen information over to Coke.
So while this story is not quite like breaking into Fort Knox to steal gold, if you understand a little about the security history and background of Coke, you can understand how utterly shocking this is to the company.
From the AP here:
3 charged with stealing Coca-Cola secrets
ATLANTA – Coca-Cola and Pepsi are usually bitter enemies, but when PepsiCo Inc. got a letter offering to sell Coke trade secrets, it went straight to its corporate rival.
Six weeks later, three people face federal charges of stealing confidential information, including a sample of a new drink, from The Coca-Cola Co. and trying to sell it to PepsiCo Inc.
The suspects arrested Wednesday the day a $1.5 million transaction was to occur include a Coke executive’s administrative assistant, Joya Williams, who is accused of rifling through corporate files and stuffing documents and a new Coca-Cola product into a personal bag.
Williams, 41, of Norcross, Ga., and 30-year-old Ibrahim Dimson of New York and 43-year-old Edmund Duhaney of Decatur, Ga., were charged with wire fraud and unlawfully stealing and selling Coke trade secrets, federal prosecutors said.
Coke thanked Pepsi for its assistance.
Video surveillance showed Williams at her desk at Coke headquarters going through multiple files looking for documents and stuffing them into bags. She also was observed holding a liquid container with a white label, which resembled the description of a new Coca-Cola product sample, before placing it into her personal bag, prosecutors say, adding that Coca-Cola later verified the sample was genuine and is a product the company is developing.
So you see that even the offices inside Headquarters are under video surveillance. You can be sure that the guards that were supposed to monitor those cameras is going to be fired. And Coke is going to crack down on background checks even more now.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Nebraska Screws Deadbeat Dads and Single Moms
Jun 30th
Well, this is only a partial screwing. It seems like the security was breached by either a script kiddie or an automated worm, but it exhibits how important it is for all branches of State Governments to maintain very tight security controls on its public webservers.
From the AP here:
Hacker gets into Neb. child-support system
LINCOLN, Neb. – A hacker broke into the child-support computer system run by the state Treasurer’s office and may have obtained names, Social Security numbers and other information of 300,000 people and 9,000 employers.
The system helps collect and disperse child-support payments.
The hacker got into a back-up computer server Wednesday morning for about 40 minutes and launched a virus, which Ross said was immediately removed.
Ross said the hacker was “probably from outside the United States.”
He said he did not believe any information was downloaded but that the State Patrol is launching a computer forensic investigation of the incident.
What is a backup server doing on the Internet? To launch a virus, an attacker must have system level access, so it means that the webserver was not properly configured.
Someone should get a pink slip over this.
It’s hard enough to pay child support or raise a child by yourself. The last thing you need is for the State to be completely negligent and expose your already tenuous financial stability to the grave risk of identity theft.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Comcast Blows; Verizon FiOS Rules
Jun 26th
First of all, it has been raining non-stop here in the DC Metro area for 2 days now. Rivers and creeks are cresting their banks. Roads are washing out. Underpasses are filling with water. The Beltway was temporarily closed due to weather. A 140 year old elm tree fell over at the White House.
And, predictably, during heavy rainstorms, there are rampant power outages, downed lines, cable TV outages, and the cloudy weather blocks satellite reception. I used to have comcast, and besides it being extremely expensive, the installation and service takes forever if there is a problem.
Case in point is a sensational new video up on YouTube this past week in which a Comcast repairman showed up at a Northern VA man’s home to fix his cable connection to get his broadband working. The repairman was filmed sleeping on the customer’s couch, and the customer uploaded the video to Youtube. The video became virulent and everyone saw it. Even Comcast HQ. Comcast fired the guy today. Click the photo below to see the YouTube video.
From the AP here:
Comcast employee sleeps during house call
PHILADELPHIA – Comcast Corp. has fired an employee for sleeping on a customer’s couch during a house call after video of the incident became a minor Internet sensation.
Customer Brian Finkelstein posted video of the sleeping technician and told this story on YouTube.com, a site that lets users share videos.
His Comcast Internet connection had worked only intermittently since he moved to a new apartment June 1. A Comcast employee who came to Finkelstein’s home June 14 to replace the modem called the company for help. Put on hold for more than an hour, he caught some shut-eye while he waited.
Finkelstein, a Georgetown University law student, picked up his video camera, added an Eels song with the lyrics “I need some sleep,” and sent it to YouTube.
This is not the first customer-service issue to embarrass Comcast. In August, the company said it had fired two employees in the Chicago area for changing a woman’s name on her bill to a derogatory term after she repeatedly complained about poor service.
I have FiOS from Verizon.
There were zero outages of my service yesterday, and even if the power had flickered, Verizon installs the fiber converter with an Uninterruptable Power Supply to keep the cable boxes on. If you are tired of Comcast, and I know you are, check with Verizon to see if it is in your area yet and sign up!
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(1 votes, average: 6.00 out of 6) Loading ...Fake Document Ring Broken
Jun 22nd
Just blocks from the State Department and the White House. Generating these fake documents is a huge business, and this is a blow to illegal immigrants and would-be terrorists who need documentation to operate in the states.
From WMAL here:
WASHINGTON (AP) – Federal agents have arrested eight illegal immigrants who they say were part of a fake document ring operating out of Adams Morgan.
Agents say they seized 14,000 dollars and more than 100 fake documents Tuesday, including green cards, Social Security cards and employment authorization cards.
The ring is thought to be linked to an international organization run by the Castorena-Ibarra family, whose kingpin was captured in Mexico this week. Authorities say Tuesday’s raid was part of Operation Card Shark, an immigration and Customs Enforcement initiative that began in 2002.
The investigation has dismantled three other counterfeit documents rings and arrested 195 people in Adams Morgan.
This is good work by the ICE guys. More on the ringleader can be found here.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Ag Dept. Screws DC Employees
Jun 22nd
The Department of Agriculture gleefully announced that they think they could have maybe been hacked or something like that. Social Security Numbers and other personally identifiable info was snagged, maybe, by attackers.
From the AP here:
WASHINGTON – A hacker broke into the Agriculture Department’s computer system and may have obtained names, Social Security numbers and photos of 26,000 Washington-area employees and contractors, the department said Wednesday.
Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said the department will provide free credit monitoring for one year to anyone who might have been affected.
The break-in happened during the first weekend in June, the department said. Technology staff learned of the breach on June 5 and told Johanns the following day but believed personal information was protected by security software, the department said.
However, on further analysis, staff concluded that data on current or former employees might have been accessed and informed Johanns on Wednesday, according to the department.
The department said it notified law enforcement agencies. Its inspector general is investigating the break-in.
This story disturbs me for several reasons. First, this sounds like it was data for security badges. What is this data doing on a network that is accessible on a public network? Also, there is no information in the story that points to anyone at Ag knowing for sure that the data was compromised. This means that not only is the data on a public network, the Ag department is not monitoring this network with any degree of skill that could really tell if the data was hacked or not.
Also, as a bit of backstory, the Ag department is one of the most geographically dispersed federal agencies behind the Postal Service. Wherever there are farms, there are Ag department offices, and each office has their own systems and networks, and none of them are centrally managed to ensure that they are patched. In addition, these remote networks are often allowed back to central or regional hubs via remote control software and mashups of VPN software. The story doesnt offer any glimpses of how the hack was perpetrated, but it is very likely that it happened from a remote network that had elevated access.
What are the odds that Federal Agencies are crying about social security numbers being stolen just so they can get an increase in their federal budget for IT systems? Finally, like all federal agencies, the Agriculture Department has its own Inspector’s General Office. All IG’s carry handguns. I just find it humorous that an Ag worker, essentially a farmer-bureaucrat, has a handgun.
Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.
(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...
