Posts by jde96

UK uni warns students of phishers trying to nick their tuition fees

Happened to us...

Our company has recently been the subject of a similar attack, setting up a fake website with jobs on it, posting job adverts, and inviting people to a 6 week training course with fees of about $2,500, which they promise to pay back on completion. We're UK based, and the fraud made it look like we were branching out into the US and taking people on.

Cue lots of worried Americans emailing and calling us wondering whether it was legit. They'd been sent contracts of employment and all sorts and all seemed to be at different stages through the fraud, from seeing the initial advert, to booking flights / hotels to go to the non-existent course.

We contacted Action Fraud, who appeared to do nothing at all, and we got the website shut down by messaging a very nice Ukrainian DNS provider who were very helpful, but they popped back a week later with the same website, and slightly altered DNS name (they put a hyphen in it). That's now shut down too, and it's been quite for a week or 2 now.

IT boss 'set up fake companies to charge his employers $2.4m'

Re: Consultancy...

I half-jokingly considered setting up such an enterprise, but only for IT requests I considered to be a total waste of money in the first place. JDE Pointless IT Ltd has a nice ring to it...

UK digital minister denies legal right to 10Mbps is 'damp squib'

Re: But What Does It Mean?

Might be worth checking again, our office in West End has just become FTTC enabled in the last month, being activated next week. Our central Glasgow office however...

PBX phone system hacking nets crooks $50 million over four years

Close...

When I was testing our first FreePBX system, I left a firewall rule on to experiment with using an external SIP client for a whole 2 days, and in that time, more than one IP had hijacked it, cracked the admittely pisspoor password on one of the extensions' accounts, and made a bunch of dodgy international calls. Luckily, I used a pay as you go SIP trunk provider and only loaded it with £5 of credit. The number of unsuccessful calls from after the credit ran out made my eyes water...

Lesson very much learnt. Now in production for 18 months, handsets can only connect from our internal network, the firewall rule for the trunk provider only allows their IP range and all the handset passwords are MD5 hashes (as they are by default in FreePBX). To date, no problems... but our ISDN30 system in another office, handled by an external firm, used to get bombarded every couple of weeks with calls attempting to gain access to outside lines. To my knowledge they never did, but no-one could make any calls for about 15 minutes at a time as they could take all the lines up.

BACS Bank Holiday BALLS UP borks 275,000 payments

Re: That's as it should be

While there have certainly been emergency bank holidays in the past, (15th March 1968 in the UK was one), the August bank holiday has been observed in its current location since 1965, and between 1871 and then was the first Monday in August. You'd need a double layer tin foil hat if you believe that's got anthing to do with stemming a regular, annual crisis of some sort.

For the record, I was affected by this, but got paid at about 8PM.

Comments considered harmful: WordPress web hijack bug revealed

Re: Ah Comments.

It says in the article that viewing the malicious comment in the admin panel is exactly how the admin account is compromised...

Landlines: The tech that just won't die

I recently ceased our landline and TV with Virgin Media, and went for Asterisk SIP over the broadband, which works quite nicely.

However, I had Virgin come back on a couple of days later and say that if we kept the landline, we could pay about £7 LESS a month than just having the boadband on, for 12 months, with no extra commitment etc. Obviously we said yes, then just didn't plug the landline back in.

The Register editorial job ad

Re: A tabloid journalist for El Reg with Fluency in English eh

The first I heard of The Register was in about 1999, when my boss and senior programmer went to a trade show in Birmingham, and came back with a 4-page tabloid digest of El Reg.