Posts by Albatross

America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

While people focus on Russia, that's geography and not class. This is a class war. These are the world's oligarchs, people so wealthy that they have no particular loyalty to any nation, and who operate outside the laws of any nations, who have set their sights on America.

Look at what happened when the USSR fell - the oligarchs basically walked in and took public resources, former "government" resources, and pocketed them. And Putin, being the biggest thief, was left in charge.

Now they're looking to do the same thing in the USA. Dismantle it, remove all laws and regulations, and seize for their own anything they want. Who's going to stop them? Nobody.

Anyone with enough power is bought off, and anyone who won't be bought off will be "investigated" or eventually simply disappeared.

And the media sanewashes the whole thing... because the media is owned by the oligarchs!

It's going to take labor actions to change this, because withholding labor and shutting down the system is the only way to impact the wallets of the oligarchs.

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

Re: Insider threat!

Huh, that SAME guy worked at a place where I once worked! His cubicle was piled with garbage, with a spherical indentation into which he could socket his bulk. When his cubicle gets too fragrant the office shuffles the cubicles, which process persuades him to toss some of the trash.

The first meeting I had with him I asked why a certain set of systems were directly exposed to the Internet, on public IPs. He shouted at me, and I was later told that he was particularly sensitive that "for performance reasons" those systems remain directly on the Internet with no firewall. Still are to this day.

Garbage guy was presenting during a meeting with me, several others, and one particularly puckish colleague when a question was raised about the "backplane" of a certain switch. Garbage guy started tying "backplane" into his search bar, but when he had typed "back" the searchbar briefly displayed something akin to "https backpages(.)com / City / escorts / redhead /..."

I exchanged a look with my puckish colleague, who took the next opportunity to ask Garbage guy to explain "the backplane thing" again. Sure enough, Garbage guy repeats the entire process, and the URL appeared again.

Nothing came of it, Garbage guy is still there and I'm long gone, but... ew.

Cloud engineer wreaks havoc on bank network after getting fired

Re: Amazing!

Not long ago I was in a big meeting of network personnel discussing firewall configurations. A friend of mine, who has always been rather cheeky, asked a question about the firewall backplane, and the fellow running the meeting began to type the word "backplane" into his browser. But when he typed "b-a-c-k-p" the URL changed momentarily to something that read "backpages com escorts redhead ... "

Eyebrows raised, I exchanged a surprised look with my friend who had asked the question. Five minutes later, quite reliably, he simply asked the question again... and the same thing happened.

So this lonely senior network engineer of 30 years' experience didn't have the sense not to search for companionship using a different computer, or even an incognito window...

A long time ago (over 20 years) I was working as a consultant and was called into a bank. They told me that they wanted me to sit in on a disciplinary meeting - they had uncovered evidence that their chief network engineer of 10 years was looking through personnel records. They wanted me to "back up" their evidence if their network engineer denied it.

I took a minute to think and told them that this wouldn't work. I told them that they had lost trust in their chief network engineer and that they had no choice but to replace him. Disciplining him and then putting him back on the network was just asking for trouble, I told them.

To their credit, they listened to me, and so instead of sitting in on a disciplinary meeting I assisted them in prepping to change all his passwords while he was in a dismissal meeting (to avoid just such a problem as we see in this article.)

That's when the fun began. It turned out that he had set up a hot backup of all the primary systems. Over T1 lines. To his apartment. He had half a dozen primary backup servers in his apartment.

So that involved a lot of effort and negotiation but he cooperated and we pulled all those systems back and finally wrapped things up with him, or so I thought.

About six months later the bank calls me again - they think they have a hacker. The systems are suffering all these weird errors, especially mid-day. I'd seen behavior like this before and figured it was a problem in network communications. Finally I figured out the problem...

When we had dismissed the network engineer we had changed his passwords and done all that stuff. But what we HADN'T done was contacted the ISP and taken the engineer's name off the list of people authorized to make changes. And so six months after he was let go the network engineer had called up, voice, and asked the ISP engineers with whom he was familiar to have the bank's network bandwidth reduced to 56k. He didn't terminate it, that would have been noticed immediately. Instead, he reduced it to the minimum connection available while remaining in service.

The bank didn't take any action against him, but I added that note to my list of things to change when terminating trusted personnel.

Here's how we got persistent shell access on a Boeing 747 – Pen Test Partners

Re: What Now?

No, complete Doctor Who? scenario - the minute you connect up your device, everyone with headsets on is turned into a Cyberman. Cyberperson? Okay, fine, a Dalek.

Insider Threats

"the necessary Ethernet port for gaining access is in the 747's galley: an area rarely left unattended for more than a few minutes during flight. Using the exploits PTP found to pwn an in-flight 747 would be impossible in practice."

Unless, of course, the hacker is one of the flight attendants. Or the hacker connects an unobtrusive RJ45-to-wireless connector to the galley RJ45 port when boarding and then hacks from the comfort of their seat.

Dropbox blames staffer's password reuse for spam flood breach

Multi-factor authentication

Dear Dropbox,

If you did not provide or require multi-factor authentication (MFA) then this breach was simply inevitable and the breach is YOUR fault, the fault of a company that hurried into production a service which handles sensitive data without proper security architecture. Your multiple security breaches illustrate that you simply lack any understanding of information security practices and principles, and your statement blaming an employee indicates you lack managerial and public relations skills as well.

Good luck with your future business. If you'd like the assistance of a professional security architect, please feel free to drop me a line

How to make boots on Mars affordable - One way trips

Sign me up!

I left a clause in my marriage vows allowing me to sign up for interplanetary missions, so just show me where to sign up. Any chance that Katie Price or Keeley Hazell are considering joining?