Re: The software nasty was inserted into the SWIFT terminal
Why, since none of those were involved?
2212 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2009
It's not a vulnerability on the SWIFT side which is why they aren't footing the bill. Their network is more secure than any of my other previous employers, including Air Traffic Services. If they are culpable at all it is for allowing the Bangladesh Bank to join their network.
It seems suspcious that the Bangladesh Bank was seup using $10 second hand switches unable to isolate the SWIFT terminal, not just criminal incompetence and more likely a designed in vulnerability.
There were 36 fraudulent wire transfers, and only 5 were successful, so these were very high value transactions. Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation's branch manager Maia Santos Deguito took $427,000 from one of the laundery accounts in the Philipines, but the main criminals appear to be Chinese with a very good knowledge of SWIFT terminals and procedures.
Hiya El Reg,
In a fit of informed petulance I decided to dump Google last month. I jettisoned my Gmail account, or as I normally have to sign in here, my GoogleMail account ("Our records show you have been a member since 2007-04-11").
By chance I haven't cleared my cookies yet, because I don't want to ditch this esteemed (steaming?) magazine. So I updated my details here to change my email address, and as told "We've sent a verification email to" my old gmail address. Catch 22.
I'm the poor sod who has been on trial for BoP, since Drew gave me my bronze badge, and my trial date has been pushed back till sometime in summer - I'm basically Job. I 'm not asking for sympathy, I would however like a little help changing my email address here without having to sign in to google again. MyName@Protonmail.com or dot ch, preferably both.
I've suffered enough and that bronze badge is all I've got left. My cat died a week ago. My dad is getting a pacemaker fitted next week. Please don't make me re~register just because your automated log-in/ change-of-details process is slightly dafter than a Google April's fool. Or at least tell me which of these bloody cookies I have to preserve for eternity to keep my login here.
Steve Gibson has some nice freeware to check for that, if anyone is worried their employer is doing the same - Fingerprints
When I bought my first home in the late '80s , it came with an antique '30s Bakelite rotary phone worth several hundreds of pounds, and a 3 digit phone number. Within a year my 3 digit phone number had been replaced by a 10 digit phone number. Worse still, my guinea pigs got loose when I was at work and gnawed through the phone cord. British Telecom, in their infinite greed, immediately sent men to break into my home to replace that phone with a cheapo button-dial replacement, in their words so I wouldn't be inconvenienced. Effing thieves. If I'd have phoned for any other fault then they wouldn't have responded for months, but they knew they could reclaim the phone and sell it on.
I'm no fan of rip-off modern telco-companies, but you have to bear in mind that in those days British Telecom were a law unto themselves. One of the proudest achievements in my career was getting a written apology from British Telecom, after three months hard work on my part and no effort on their part. An airgun pellet in an over-head leased line would short the circuit in high winds, disrupting the network I was responsible for. British Telecom staff at the time were as unsympathetic as DWP staff are today.
"You don't have to be a misanthrope to work here, but it helps"
Your reference is the pornographic magazine Penthouse, and the reason for that is that it's publisher Bob Guccione married sci-fi freak Kathy Keeton. They then co-published the sublime Omni magazine. It also had typically sexist paintings of voluptuous fantasy characters, but I promise, as a 13 year old male I only read it for the articles.
HG Wells invented the nuclear suitcase bomb in his 1914 novel The World Set Free, albeit it was more of an ever lasting firework.
More's 'Utopia' itself could be reimagined as a dystopia from the POV of one it's citizens.
I am hugely impressed with "A Logic Named Joe" and hope El Reg dig up more. Can I suggest "I have no mouth, but I must scream", which I thought of every day in the hell of tech support.
I was hired as a Business Consultant at a firm in the Netherlands, and then demoted to SysAdmin because my Scottish accent was too strong. I wasn't happy at that, and I never wanted to be the PC police especially in a country where laws and attitudes towards sex were so different.
Engineers and salesmen would dial in to use the (then) high speed and free office internet rather than take out an account of their own. Even the ones with their own internet connections would view porn via the office presumably as they assumed it gave them more plausible deniability. The company internet server cache was massive, and at least three quarters of it was porn, as I found out when I had to investigate exorbitant charges from our ISP. It was hard to look at any of my co-workers the same way, especially the women. I sent out a memo to everyone explaining what a cache is, and asking them not to view anything they wouldn't want me to have to view, and instantly the internet bill was halved (and nobody could look at me either).
I've had a few experiences of being surprised or shocked by porn at work, but nothing close to "call the police", maybe I'm just deviant. I worked for an imaging/workflow company once, and they were trying to prove their system to a local NHS, so I was made to scan in and process sample medical records they provided, perhaps illegally. That was the most traumatic two days I ever spent at work. All the records were dead and dying children: X rays, photos, case-notes, etc. When you lot talk about things you can't unsee, well nothing I saw hadn't already been seen by a dozen doctors and nurses who probably see that sort of thing every week. They have all my respect, because decades later just thinking about it has me crying and reaching for the brandy.
I was asked to fix a Belgian guys laptop once, it was running slow. AVG identified over 37,000 viruses on it. That was unusually high so I went to delete the internet cache, and it had already been deleted but all the sites were still there - IP numbers rather than URLs, all Russian. He'd been engaged to a local woman who privately accused him of being a paedophile, and I'd seen him groom, kiss and even lick her daughter, I was certain she was correct. I didn't have enough evidence against him to phone the police, but I kept tabs on him. He later joined a social group where he had access to their children as a figure of trust, so I warned them about him. He had me charged by the police for doing that. They dropped my prosecution when I mentioned I had a recording of his ex-fiancee discussing his behaviour.
On a US magazine website I recently had my first conversation with someone who admitted to being a reformed paedophile, which I found very interesting. I'm a hang'em and flog'em guy when it comes to adult abusers, so it was informative finally being able to "Ask me anything". I think I have a better understanding of it now but I'd still recommend that if you can take action against someone who is a child-abuser, or even against someone who gets off on images or video of child-abuse, then you should do what you can. According to the honest paedophile I talked to, one thing does lead to another worse thing.
I really want to know how to stop a Win10 update repeatedly trying and failing to install itself on this PC, slowing down this bandwidth and eating up 10Gb of unrecoverable HD space. Please, nobody tell me, I have more important things to do just now and will have plenty of time to figure it out soon one way or another.
My over my self confidence has just been boosted greatly by googling IMAO and finding it recognised widely. I can't prove I invented that first, but I did come invent it independently before it was Yahoo~able, and you can't patent a FLA.
I didn't invent FLA, it was common among my fellow students back in the '80s, an extension of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-letter_acronym 's, a seemingly witty riposte to excessive use of jargon and acronyms in IT.
[Two letter acronyms were and are deemed ok - occasionally knowledgeable]
My hive mind is failing me. There was a great quote in a Guardian book review that agreed with your statement from an English earl at the time of the French revolution. It stated that he would rather have a score of cut-throats in London than suffer the mass state terrorism and surveillance endured in France.
Except that is just the gist because every time I go searching for it I get redirected to Google CAPTCHAs, despite my other googling working fine. So I guess that quote has been deemed inconvenient. Of course the actual quote never mentioned state terrorism, because at the time all terrorism was by the state against its own citizens. That was such an inconvenient word that it's very meaning has been changed.
I did once try to look for needles in a field after something went boom.
When the Lockerbie disaster happened the police warned people away from just one section of countryside because the flight was seemingly carrying a cargo of needles, the warning being that people could accidentally stand on them and hurt themselves (no mention of the still flaming wreckage). Needles are a low-value item never normally transported by air, and there was some suggestions by relatively sane people that they were "flechettes" and part of awful munitions that were being secretly transported and may have caused the explosion.
One easy way to test this theory would be to find either a needle or a flechette in the fields using a metal detector, so I consulted with a 'detectorist' I chanced upon on scanning a beach, and tried to gain access to the area. I was unsuccessful, partly I think due to state action.
On a differing related subject, I was aware that Depleted Uranium was regularly used as ballast on many large aircraft, so when 911 occurred I phoned the airlines to ask if it had been present on the New York flights, as this would have a serious impact on the residents and first responders health. I got no reply but a swift visit from a lost american tourist, in a town where no american tourists had been lost before or since. And now the NY first responders are all dying of cancer while their medical support is a political football as highlighted by Jon Stewart.
I used to fill my criminal drives with MP3s after formatting them as I had more songs than disk-space. Then I started I started getting raided on bogus terrorism excuses and I built a forge, better than a hammer.
There's a really good, if irrelevant, NS article just online, Memory recall works twice as fast as the blink of an eye
When I was a four year old I used to test how fast I could think by throwing my self off a small flight of steps and trying to think something before I landed. I never could think anything mid-air except, "Think something" which didn't count as I'd already been thinking that. I concluded I was a slow-thinker, and as I grew older others certainly were more 'quick-witted'. They tend to get in a lot more trouble earlier on though, it's a common-difference in brain function that leaves them open to impulsive short-termism and leaves me more open to brain-freezing in emergency situations.
Computer magazines and websites have speed-tests for machine components, processors and systems, I hope someone develops something like that for humans. There are seemingly four stages to human memory, remembering it, recalling it and I forget the other two. Not my field of study. Still, I'm in a court case just now that mostly relates to events from decades ago, and I seem to be the only person who remembers anything, and I remember those past events too well if anything. Being able to forget, to wipe memory, must be as much of a blessing. I wish there was a Darik's Boot And Nuke for the mind, like Eternal Sunshine, but everyone seems intent on memory augmentation implants.
People with autistic tendencies vulnerable to alcohol problems
"Linux is certainly becoming more and more tempting"
You kind of have to know both MS and a Unix variant if you want to call yourself a techie, and that's been true for thirty years. If you just know one in depth then you can call yourself a technologist, but 'techie' implies a 'jack of all trades' able to field any daft question from a newbie. You can block Win10 data-slurping if you know how to modify your router.
Can I test my Sherlock skillz out on you? Are you a British born and bred citizen but with a parent from the middle-east? Your hogmanay greeting seems mixed race. My Afghan, Iranian and Iraqi pals always wish me a 'successful and prosperous' New Year, whereas my inbred British pals never mention prosperous and stick solely to happiness. It's either that or you're more of a Trekker than a Whovian.
Did the winning cartoon for the XKCD competition ever get published here? I'm still working on mine, it should be ready for the next time he releases a book.
Want to feel young? The Wii is only ten years old. It feels like my Mariokarts record has stood for far longer than that.
I think Egypt probably banned it because they want to keep their poor ignorant, given the major news site on it is the BBC outside of their police state control. I'm no fan of Facebook, or the BBC for that matter, but partial internet access is far better than no internet access and I'm glad the BBC took part. It probably reaches as many people as the World Service for virtually no cost. There are some useful websites on it that are making a real difference to it's users.
"Your repeated prison fantasies are both bizarre and unwelcome."
Can I quote that in court this month? I've got a date with a sheriff who thinks he's Judge Dredd.
I just watched an episode of Alias Smith and Jones with the wrong actor and have lost the will to go on the run.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alias_Smith_and_Jones#Death_of_Pete_Duel
I pasted all my old 2000ADs onto bus-shelters in chronological order, and then I found a cartoon version of this classic online, so I printed and pasted it too. It occurs to me now that this may be the longest sentence in Sci-Fi, and perhaps the most terrifying:
It was just like what they did to Winston Smith in "1984," which was a book none of them knew about, but the techniques are really quite ancient, and so they did it to Everett C. Marm, and one day quite a long time later, the Harlequin appeared on the communications web, appearing elfish and dimpled and bright-eyed, and not at all brainwashed, and hesaid he had been wrong, that it was a good, a very good thing indeed, to belong, and be right on time hip-ho and away we go, and everyone stared up at him on the public screens that covered an entire city block, and they said to themselves, well, you see, he was just a nut after all, and if that's the way the system is run, then let's do it that way, because it doesn't pay to fight city hall, or in this case, the Ticktockman.
Bus-shelters are the worst form of time-travel.
It starts with a great quote from Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience, but here is a more appropriate quote for the daftie above:
"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
The first thing I ever won was a Stars Wars board game in an Edinburgh Evening News 'spot the difference' competition. It was quite good considering it was just merchandise, I should have saved it.
The second thing I won was a bottle of whisky in a school raffle; unfortunately my mum was there and confiscated it - though the school had no problem giving it to me.
The third thing I won as a £15 book token for a BASIC computer array of the year, to use as ZX diary. Lotus Notes, Lotus I forget the name (Organizer), I beat ya by a decade.
The fourth thing I earned is my Bronze badge here. I guess somewhere along this sad tale I also earned my cynicism and weary resignation but it didn't come with an actual award.
FWIW, I know a woman who has been smuggling Class A drugs from the Netherlands to the UK for the past thirty years. She takes no precautions and yet she's never been caught for the simple reason she doesn't get nervous, she's a bit of a sociopath. I don't approve, she has killed many people, but the cops aren't interested in her so what do you do?
My candle trick was mainly to clam my nerves, but the wax stops he smell getting out if it wasn't in the air when the candle was remelted. To detect that tiny level of hash, well the dog would false positive every bit of luggage leaving the Netherlands.
Better policy would be to retrain the dog to sniff out cancer and end the cannabis prohibition.
I actually built my own forge to melt-hard disks (for about £10 for the iron bucket and fire-clay) but that is for long term disposal of hard-disks. In an actual police raid though you have about 15 seconds unless you live in a lair, so sitting on a DVD in your back pocket is best advice. They might theoretically be able to reconstruct all the aluminum fragments, but they won't. They rely mostly on Hum-Int, which is why you train to say 'No Comment'.
I smuggled skunk from the Netherlands to France for personal use on a holiday. There were no border guards so I was being overly-cautious but with some cause - the French prosecute cannabis exactly as they prosecute heroin.
I chose to buy a scented candle in a coloured-glass vase, melt the wax, insert the dope, put the scented wax back around it. I doubt a dog could have detected any dope odour from it.
>I have downvoted you as using the "Won't somebody think of the children." argument bugs the hell out of me.
I haven't downvoted but won't someone think of that cats?
Apparently the Chaos Computer Club have reacted to "I Know Where Your Cat Lives" by disguising their cat photos as fried eggs.
Larry Walters is probably the only person to earn a Darwin Award before killing themselves. And he is probably spinning in his grave over this.
Does anyone have one of those banned pseudo-hoverboards that explode when they overheat? My nephew wants one and I'd like to get him one.
"Just saying"?!!! MUMPS is epidemic parotitis spread by a paramyxovirus.
I regularly slag our government, our judiciary and corporations here and nobody bats an eyelid. But if anyone dares express a preference for a programming language or an operating system then all hell is let loose. More important issues than matters of life and death.
"You lot evolved from ape-like hominids. (Clearly not very far, in some cases.) That doesn't mean you are still apes. You're human now."
Wow. I didn't down-vote you because I know what it is like to publish an article that was misunderstood, but really, attacking your audience? That's not a healthy career progression. 'Commentards' here say all sorts of silly things, we are mostly self-correcting but the clue is in our name.
By the way, and I'm not saying this to annoy you, we are all still apes.
C<Pascal<Basic
A genius of a man was briefly assigned to babysit me on my apprenticeship, much to his disgust, and his first words to me were,"Write a Pascal program that print's out the Fibonacci series". I replied, "Well I know who Pascal was but I don't know who Fibonacci was or what his series was".
The look of revulsion on the guys face was priceless, like he was "licking something sick and wrong".
I liked Pascal as a language, it seemed elegant compared to Basic and Assembly. A very good stepping stone to C. Then all you pesky Objectified Orientated kids came along and ruined programming for everybody.
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946, 17711, 28657, 46368, 75025, 121393, 196418, 317811
Terrorism isn't that scary, but how do we fight being crushed by our own furniture?
I have a new stylish wardrobe still in it's flat-pack box, free to anyone who wants to pick it up from near Edinburgh. Genuine offer, I just can't take that risk anymore now I know the stats.
"In the UK you are seriously out of luck, because they have made it illegal not to comply with incriminating yourself."
That is sadly true. Mind you, Donald J Trump is a figure of fun over here, not a contender. If we are "seriously out of luck" then you can get to f---...
Lots of people carry their passports around, for example when leaving the country or trying to cash their dole giro.
Lots of people lose their laptops, to theft fire or just misplacing them.
A wee tip. Trying to convey any idea on a public forum by labelling every normal person as 'sheeple' is hardly endearing and doesn't make you look big or clever, quite the reverse. Trust me, I have malt whisky.
"The point of the device encryption is to protect the information on the system from being accessed after it was lost or stolen, not to protect the user from elaborate state-sponsored attacks or corrupt governments."
True, but it really should be explicit about that health warning. And where do you draw the line between a script-kiddie and an APT? For example, do the local police and council have access to my data if I trust MS encryption? Yes, they apparently do. And they shouldn't.
Hey, the DPRK also produce their own PCs (unlike backwards Britain where your best computer is a Pi that doesn't even a keyboard). Those North Korean laptops also have USB ports, so why not blame the USB Implementers Forum? Plus they'd never have nuclear weapons if Einstein hadn't blabbed, and they'd all float off into space if Newton had kept quiet about gravity.
If you really want to damage the Norks then go post on their forums. Your amazing stupidity is a liability to the free world.
I realise The Intercept is playing catch-up, but it is timely:
Recently Bought a Windows Computer? Microsoft Probably Has Your Encryption Key
2015 is the first year I gave up on owning a mobile after thirty years, due to increasing police abuse of my tracking device. I can though offer a review of BT 'public telephone boxes'. I happen to live near three, although they are much rarer than they used to be presumably because none of them can actually make a phone call. All the perspex is covered in advertising so inside is too dark to dial unless you take a torch. Compared to a 1980s phone box they are pretty impregnable, so little vandalism, but they simply don't work anyway. They eat your coins and refuse, play you an 'old skool' meaningless tone, and give no refund. I go there mostly for the nostalgia.
One pleasant and counter-intuitive improvement is that they no longer smell of urine. For some strange reason men, and Scottish women, used to go into phoneboxes to pee, and given that they are now totally shielded from view by the advertising I'd expected that use to have increased, along with drug-use, sexual encounters and so on. But no, apparently even the drunks and the junkies will no longer risk the social stigma of being seen walking into one of them.
Given the phones no longer work I guess we should call them billboard boxes. To call anyone I wait until the local internet cafe opens up. And if anything defines poverty it is still living next to three phone boxes and an internet cafe.
"You know/knew there's no magic wall around Ireland."
Parochial and missing the fact Ireland always has been under more surveillance by British security services than even the UK. Equally stupid and parochial, the top story on BBC News Scotland just now is headlined "Crime gangs using apps to evade police", although the actual headline is slightly less inaccurate, "Organised gangs using technology to evade police".
It's PR FUD fluff after numerous headlines here highlighting the fact PoliceScotland IT is abysmal, [Police recording incidents on paper after IT glitch, Police to be retrained in data protection as concerns mount over 'snooping' investigations, IT mismatch hampers single police force with eight computer systems] the real headline here should be 'Scottish cops are too daft to understand the everyday technology ordinary Scots use'.
The fact is when Scottish cops are given access to any technology they misuse it illegally to abuse innocent civilians. I once got to question a top cop here and he wasn't one bit ashamed about police over-reach, he said, "If we can do it, we do do it". And because we have a McMickey Mouse legal system and a Fisher-Price parliament here they get away with it.
I'll soon be giving criminals free lessons on proper IT security and encryption, simply because they are the less criminal and more moral than the uniformed gangs we employ.
This is off topic but I'll hang it on Donald Trump.
The Guardian has published these two stories about police infiltrators north of the border. No comments allowed there so I'll state this here.
Push to extend inquiry into police infiltration of campaigners to Scotland
Ex-undercover officer who infiltrated political groups resigns from academic posts
I was the first guy this millenium to be chatted up by a proven undercover policewoman. I'm banned from the Guardian for pointing out one of their contributors is also an infiltrator.
A decade ago anyone could be forgiven for identifying the wrong people as infiltrators into the peace-movement, due to misinformation and paranoia. Today though there is no such excuse. The infiltrators all have since been rewarded with foreign travel, expensive courses, well-paid jobs. The actual activists are still being fucked over, sometimes literally. Many lives have been destroyed, and yet the worst of the worst are still highly regarded and unexposed. It's an affront to the ideal of democracy.
I'm not trying to cower you into submission through fear. I'm recommending 'black-box testing' and a healthy suspicion of those who label you paranoid.
In the Netherlands it is considered bad-form to speed past anyone. It's kind of the point everywhere else. But Holland is as flat as a 1970s Doctor Who set, and most 90 year olds cycle, so although it's a fairly macho culture, not so on bikes. You are frowned upon if you go too fast.
The metal antlers were frankly terrifying! As a pedestrian, as a cyclist, hell, they'd even scare a stag. The bike was never stolen though, and in Dutch law the cyclist is never at fault.
I had a bike stolen there, and was told by my Dutch fiancee to rush to 'Junkie Bridge' to buy it back before someone else bought it. "But pay no more than 25 guilders or else you'll raise the price for the rest of us". Seemingly buying back your own bike is the Dutch method of charity for heroin addicts.
A boss there told me a sure-fire method to get a free bike. Shout out "Hey, that's my bike" and some passing cyclist will get off guiltily and give you their bike.
At Dutch v German football matches the Dutch sing, "Give us back our bikes", a reference to when the occupying Nazis melted down Dutch bikes for the war effort.
I think it was pre-searchable web but I recall a report that visible burglar-alarms when they first started being sold that they did not have a deterrence value, quite the reverse. They simply advertised your house contained something of value compared to your neighbouring homes.
The trick is to to have the protection but not to broadcast it, to fit into the herd better. In the Netherlands I spraypainted my expensive bike black and removed the Raleigh ensign, so it didn't stand out from the mass of other bikes available. Only an expert could identify it, and most theives know nothing.
A neighbour took an alternate approach and welded metal antlers onto the front of their bike so it would be easily recognisable and a hassle to resell.
An article from The Intercept suggests the very fact the debate is on a Saturday shows the DNC want to bury the debate from view. Media Ignores Sanders Though He’s More Popular Than Trump
I happen to know GCC IT are a pile of poo, but I'll not quote specifics as I've alerted friends who actually worked there to this story and they can choose to chip in.
I used to work for a similar nearby council whose Finance Director didn't trust mag tape back-ups not to degrade, so all council records had to be printed out and stored in a huge storeroom under the town hall. Yet nobody could ever have found any meaningful data in that huge pile of flammable paper, and when I checked all the older records ink had faded away anyway.
The reason we have Scottish councillors and council officials is to keep them busy and away from more important careers like dog-walking.
Not remotely related to IT or the article which isn't remotely related to IT, but Slashdot has it and it's gruesomely interesting.
Your face mites pertain to your birthplace and the people you've rubbed faces with!
Not in the pdf, but these critters sleep in your eyelash follicles, and if enough squeeze into one follicle then they push your eyelash out.
Taking out a drone in this manner will risk dropping it onto anyone beneath it - more dangerous than the drone itself. A responsible police response would be a drone that over-rides the control signals of an errant drone with closer and therefore more powerful signals ordering it down.
Or a net with a parachute or balloons. https://xkcd.com/585/