Posts by wyatt

Attackers accessed UK military data through high-security fencing firm's Windows 7 rig

Re: > is just security theatre

Even CE+ is just a dip test, not a 100% check. If you do actually implement it well, it does help out.

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

Reminds me about the story I once heard about a system that failed.

Supplier got ripped a new one as the customer had purchased a fully redundant with failover/bells/whistles the lot and nothing should ever go down. Turns out the primary had failed a while back and no one noticed until the secondary failed.

Capita staffers told attackers stole data from its own pension fund

Re: But the data hasn't been sold...

hahaha, I can just imagine someone using 'dark' google and not finding much- you're safe then!

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

Ah yes, the joy of software that runs as an application on a server. Frequently we'd have to support customers who had installed updates (go them!) but failed to complete the process by logging the server back on to the required account. As regulated customers the lack of records could prove expensive..

UK's proposed alt.GDPR will turn Britain into a 'test lab' for data harvesting

Meh, this bill is bollocks as anyone who wants to do business with the EU will still have to meet the requirements of the EU GDPR.

So, do you have a 2 tiered system within your business or just crack on as before?

Then you have all the scumbags flogging your data- cheers gov for screwing us again.

Botched migration resulted in a great deal: One for the price of two

I loved my 6310, it did calls and was enough for me.

Uber fined $14m for lying to get customers to ditch cabs

Never personally ordered a Uber but have travelled in one, when it finally arrived. I order direct with takeaways and generally collect, I can't see the benefit of the increased cost of someone delivering it. I see the drivers sitting waiting for multiple orders at MacDonald's to make it worthwhile- who wants cold food.

IT manager's 'think outside the box' edict was, for once, not (only) a revolting cliché

Re: Static wouldn't have been the only problem

When the Gulf 2 kicked off the military requested a quote for quality fans and filters to stop sand getting into the boxes which contained servers- typically the box would run with the lid off.

Quote was of course refused as it was a lot of money. Not as much however as the cost of cleaning all the kit when it returned full of sand.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

The company I work for had a customer in the City of London. Every time something didn't go their way they'd involve their lawyers. As you'd expect, we dropped them as a customer, along with everyone else in the market.

They've recently asked us why we didn't respond to RFP they put out, same people are still in charge- do they think that people don't remember how they behave?

Ritz cracker giant settles bust-up with insurer over $100m+ NotPetya cleanup

Oh? Insurance companies haven't done their due diligence in evaluating the risk and cost of potential claims?

Guess they'll start doing this and prices will rise along with audits or attestations which if found to be lies, invalidate your claim. Nothing new here.

UK government in talks with datacenter operators over blackouts

Great having a DC working but there may not be anyone who can connect to it! It'd be interesting to know what the maximum outages are that individual components such as networking nodes/switching kit/ engineers kettles can run for in a scenario such as this.

Without having a crystal weather ball it's impossible to know if this will be an issue, whatever happens my priority will be my family.

Private equity suits at Thoma Bravo pull out of Darktrace acquisition

Re: "Mistiming" of revenue recognition

Oh look, an accountant found your dodgy reporting. Don’t pass go.

Watch a RAID rebuild or go to a Christmas party? Tough choice

Re: IBM Engineer...

I take it there were no risks identified in the change control they were working under along with mitigating steps then!?

UK police to spend tens of millions on legacy comms network kit

Oh how I wish I'd have brought shares in Motorola, they're lapping it up!

UK Home Office dangles £20m for national gun licence database system

Whilst this will undoubtedly benefit all, improvement needs to be made of the Firearms Licensing Teams as well. They're frequently poor or the issue with incorrect records.

EU cuts off key Russian banks from SWIFT system

Yep, I read this as well it was quite interesting.

File suffixes: Who needs them? Well, this guy did

I hate that setting, first thing I change when working on a system.

French telco tycoon Patrick Drahi ups Altice UK's stake in BT to 18%, says he is not planning a takeover... at least not yet

It amazes me that BT make any money, aren't they meant to be paying into a massive deficit of a pension pot? How can anyone make money when they owe so much.

I'd have also thought that BT would be considered CNI, allowing foreign control of this (and other) assets is madness.

FoI response points to network updates for ambulance outage on England's south coast

Re: So, who's update?

Frequentis do generally appear to do things better than some other suppliers I'm aware of!

Re: So, who's update?

It's interesting with the 'new' ESN network that some Blue Light services have their control rooms receiving radio traffic in hosted environments, it then gets pushed to a terminal where the user is logged on, where ever that may be. Networking has never been so important. One customer has had WAN problems ever since they started doing this to the extent they had to restrict WAN usage until they could upgrade their connectivity, something that has been ongoing for years now.

More than half of UK workers would consider jumping ship if a hybrid work option were withdrawn by their company

I agree, this only works if there is a job available in a company that is WFH that you get.

I am of the opinion that as Covid becomes accepted as here to stay, businesses will slowly return to on site activities, probably not at the same scale due to cost but some will be back in the office.

BOFH: You drive me crazy... and I can't help myself

Excellent.

I'm sure many have been on the receiving end of crap support.

Judge in UK rules Amazon Ring doorbell audio recordings breach data protection laws

Re: Surely they have to go shopping?

First thing I'd do if I was a criminal is send someone else with a spray can of paint to cover everyones ring/accessible CCTV cameras. There goes most the evidence they may have captured.

Firewalls? Pfft – it's no match for my mighty spares-bin PC

Re: executive assistance can sometimes be a good thing.

I had a fault on a bit of software that we supplied that I needed to escalate to our Development Team. Support was refused until it could be fitted into their 'sprints'.

Once I managed to get them to look at it (by escalating internally), it took them <5mins to see the issue and about 1hr to fix it. To get to that point was months.

Fired credit union employee admits: I wiped 21GB of files from company's shared drive in retaliation

Re: Rather moronic

Yep, I had to remind my people that even though the person leaving has given a date, you take away their elevated privileges now.

Leaving someone's account available after they've left the building appears to be more common than it should be!

The swift in-person response is part of the service (and nothing to do with the thing I broke while trying to help you)

Ah yes, I've disabled a NIC before without thinking things through. Fortunately it wasn't that far of a drive, it took longer to get into the server room once I was there.

I rarely work with customers who connect the management NIC.

Don't cross the team tasked with policing the surfing habits of California's teens

Business my dad was at was in danger of going bust, so many were taking time off 'sick' that there were no staff left. The union reps were called in and warned that they would be redundant soon if it continued, an agreement was reached where the problematic staff were called in for a meeting and offered assistance or be retired off (don't know the exact details but this is the gist).

To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user

Back in the day where I use to have to keep parts at home, I use to have to bring them in from the garage the night before so they'd dry out. Never good turning up to a customers site with them dripping.

PSA: If you're still giving users admin rights, maybe try not doing that. Would've helped dampen 100+ Microsoft vulns last year – report

Re: Surely there must be a better way to do this

Oooh this one too! Local IT is proactive, MSP's are reactive. I'm arguing to bring this back in house but I'll never win, it's too expensive. I'd be satisfied with some better administration of our systems but again, struggling to get traction.

Re: Surely there must be a better way to do this

I've asked for the staff who do 'need' admin rights to work this way for a few years, it never changes. We're all still logging on with Local Admin.

Smart doorbells on business premises make your property more attractive to burglars, warns researcher

Re: It's not cool or trendy, but it'll make a real difference

Problem with 'going equipt' to commit crime is that it can be used against you if you're stopped. Using what's about reduces the chances of that happening.

If I was a criminal I'd go round with a hammer or spray paint and destroy all the Ring door bells. Less chance of being on camera when you do look to nick something.

OVH data centre destroyed by fire in Strasbourg – all services unavailable

One of the main Birmingham Universities found that one of it's Computer Rooms fire suppression cylinders were empty recently, there wasn't anyone maintaining the system and topping them up as required. It took quite a period to source the required gas in the quantity required and get them charged!

Salesforce: Forget the ping-pong and snacks, the 9-to-5 working day is just so 2019, it's over and done with

Re: Up yours to HP and Yahoo etc

We've a customer service 'apprentice' who hasn't met anyone in the business yet, they started just after lockdown 1. I've no idea how they're dealing with this, I try to help them out where possible as the last thing they need is someone they don't know, haven't met and are unlikely to ever meet making their life harder.

Our company is primarily older staff who are fairly experienced and disciplined. We could do with taking on some more junior ones but as we're remote, training is definitely an issue that we (and others) need to address. Culture has been lost to an extent. It'll be interesting to see what happens this time next year, I predict that certain departments will be back in the office full time.

HP: That print-free-for-life deal we promised you? Well, now it's pay-per-month to continue using your printer ink

I recently purchased a HP printer which came with the offer of using the cartridges delivered, it sounded like a scam and I didn't even bother looking any further. Glad I did as this won't improve at all.

I'll give you my passwords if you investigate police corruption, accused missile systems leaker told cops

Re: failing to hand over his passwords to police on demand – a crime in the UK

Delete my password safe (and the backups) and I'd be screwed.

British Airways fined £20m for Magecart hack that exposed 400k folks' credit card details to crooks

I hope that, if their insurance company is approached to cover the fine they give them the finger. To have user credentials saved in files like that is one of the 'unforgivables'.

When you're On Call, only you can hear the silence of the clicks

Re: Classic Errror

Very frequently I find myself also on call with someone who has 'really poor' phone signal in their house. Or, as they work in the City, any calls that come in whilst they're underground travelling home come to me as the next in the line.

Unfortunately for them as I'm not trained in the same products as well they stack up ready for when they do answer the phone.

COVID-19 security tips: Ensure you sack your staff without leaving their IT access enabled, says Secureworks

Re: Macros

You can do this with M365, anything you submit as junk/phishing can go to an additional mailbox.

Sailfish floats v3.4 'Pallas-Yllästunturi', its latest Jolla good reason for itchy-fingered Android and Apple swervers

Likewise, I had a J1 until I lost it in a Taxi in Spain one holiday. It worked well, started to slow down towards the end but was still perfectly usable.

I currently use Android, when my current phone finally gives up on security updates (probably already happened!) I may consider putting Sailfish on it, not sure I'd do it with a primary device though.

UK's Cheshire Police tenders for whole new ERP system after Oracle Fusion went live with 'significant deficiency'

My company were looking to refresh a public sector customer's system, an internal (to them) architect decided that as someone he knew had had a bad experience with what we and another company had proposed he'd have it rejected, after the contracts had been signed!

They've now had to go back out to tender and sort out the existing contracts.

Big IQ play from IT outsourcer: Can't create batch files if you can't save files. Of any kind

Re: More than once ...

Everyone makes mistakes, it's being able to recover from them that makes you different.

Ring glitch results in global ding dong ditch: Doorbell bling flings out random pings but they're not the real thing

Yep, my wife wants a Ring thing light with the camera and speaker after our car was stolen. Said all it's going to do is video the car being stolen, another 200 notes wasted.

I didn't get one.

Think tank warns any further delay to 5G rollout will cost the UK multiple billions – but hey, at least Huawei is out

If this was to be true, was there a massive jump when 3G and 4G arrived?

Funny, that: Handy script for wiping directories is capable of wreaking havoc beyond a miscreant's wildest dreams

Re: My contribution ...

I have memories of Nortel Passports where if you didn't commit a change and it rolled it back, it'd drop all of it's ATM connections. Always interesting to see, it Christmas tree'd whilst doing it.

Re: My contribution ...

Yep, this could have saved me a lot of trouble one night shift!

Unexpected Porthcawl in the borkage area: Riding an indoor Power Truck to nowhere

Re: Have you actually been there?

Yep, we found loads in them! Wife managed to locate a crab, kids caught loads of little fish and shrimps.

Chuckle, I was there last week..! As with any location, it has its good and bad points.

UK Home Office dishes out contracts to 999 control room vendors after wasting cash on network tech it abandoned

999 calls go via the BT emergency service, 101 calls are routed via the standard PSTN.

I know that when a call taker is on a 101 call it'll/can be parked if a 999 call comes in.

If there aren't enough call takers to handle the 999 calls they should overflow to another Police Force.

Tupe them to the new provider?

Whilst I'm happy to bash Crapita most of the time, their evidence/case management software is different to their ICCS offering which is (DS2000/DS3000) known as DSx. This has been working (fairly well) for a number of years.