OK, I hate to travel into territory usually saved for other blogs but I just have to rant on this one. The TSA Brochure says: Pack liquids/gels/aerosols in your checked baggage. For a short trip you are permitted to carry-on 1 quartsize, clear plastic, zip-top bag holding 3 ounces or less containers of liquids, gels or aerosols. Limited to one bag per traveler. This afternoon, I had a 4 oz container of toothpaste that was about 1/4 full—perhaps holding 1 oz of toothpaste—dutifully packed with my other toiletries in my quart size baggie. I was flagged at screening, and pulled aside because of this. They claimed that since the package said an amount greater than 3.4 oz, it was not[…]
Category: rants
Hackers, the ones we once knew and loved are dead. That’s right, killed by movies, the Internet, and well…popularity. The hacker used to be the guy or gal a long, long time ago that would tinker. Yes, tinker, like al-Khwarizmi or da Vinci or Curie… people who wanted to figure out how things work. No, how they really work. Now we have life-hackers, Hackers, and criminals who have taken the word. The general public has thought for a while that people “hack” are bad. Hackers steal your credit card number online and can get into your ex-boyfriends computer and read all of his juicy emails. In their free time they run up to ATMs and magically remove wads of cash[…]
Just finished reading this article on SecurityFocus. Two Ohio high-school students face expulsion and criminal charges after allegedly using their access to a Web server to post a notice that the local schools had closed due to snow. It seems that the unnamed perpetrators used their own valid access password to make the modification to the website. How can the school district not have foreseen this? I’m not sure if criminal charges should apply. It was perhaps more effective at getting them out of school than wearing their pajamas inside out, but still was just a prank.
The bad guys are joining forces. Aleksey Kamardin reaped $13,158 in just 104 minutes buying and selling penny stocks. The 21-year-old bought 43,000 shares in a small Wisconsin equipment company that makes, among other things, potato harvesters. He sold the shares less than two hours later at nearly double the investment. Kamardin and his accomplices allegedly hacked into four online trading accounts of unsuspecting investors, selling off their holdings in higher-valued companies to purchase shares in Thomas Equipment, a firm whose stock that day soared from 26 cents to 80 cents a share, authorities said. The trading volume of Thomas increased tenfold. Kamardin, allegedly part of an East European ring, repeated this scheme on 13 other occasions in July and[…]
A Swedish bank has been hit by the biggest ever online heist — approximately $1M USD. The attack started by a tailormade Trojan sent in the name of the bank to some of its clients, according to McAfee. The sender encouraged clients to download a “spam fighting” application. Users who downloaded the attached file, called raking.zip or raking.exe, were infected by the Trojan, which some security companies call haxdoor.ki. Haxdoor typically installs keyloggers to record keystrokes, and hides itself using a rootkit. The payload of the .ki variant of the Trojan was activated when users attempted to log in to the Nordea online banking site. According to the bank, users were redirected to a false home page, where they entered[…]
That is a new one (for me at least). I got a spam message telling me that spammers were “targeting me and threatening my online security and that I should click here” (to some questionable link). Clever, but no cigar – plus it was caught by my spam filter.