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Is it Just Me, Or Is Our Mainframe Missing?
xnuandax writes "Here's a salient lesson for those system security personnel who spend their time fretting over the theoretical crack-ability of their 1024 bit encryption keys. Australian Customs have recently suffered a rather unfortunate set back in their "War Against Terror" with the admission that two of their secure mainframe servers have been wheeled out of the building by persons unknown. I'll bet my $2 that the root password on those boxes was 'trustno1'."
... when you don't do retinal scans on pizza delivery people.
*starts looking for cheap parts on ebay*
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Isn't that how they always did it on Josie and the Pussycats cartoon? They'd dress up as "computer repairmen" and then wheel the computer out the door, which would then infuriate the bad guy and they'd have the chase scene set to a song.
I kept saying that's how I'd get my SGI Onyx that way, but it never seemed to work out. Anybody that steals a mainframe is either looking to part it out and sell it on Ebay, or they are going to melt it down for the valuable metals.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The men, described as being of Pakistani-Indian-Arabic appearance
Thats PC for terrorist isnt it ?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Sysadmin: "HA! I have patched all my software, yelled at all the users with weak passwords, locked down every possible port and continously monitor the allowed ones, and with this keystroke I will enable UNBREAKABLE encryption on every critical data file!"
*slams hand down to hit Enter key*
*hits bare desk*
...
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
In the last 24 months:
:-)
Afganistan: Australia's Special Air Service was there, saved a few yanks in a downed helicopter. The American soldiers seemed to thing these Aussies were all right.
Iraq: Australia sent 3 boats and about 2000 special forces personell. Did a lot of (if not all of) the ground based reconisance, plus about half the search and rescue missions.
East Timor: Liberated the poor little country from the Indonesians and wiped out the resistance. Free elections were held for the first time.
Indonesia: Sent Federal Police over who "helped" with the investigation into the recent Bali Bombing.
North Korea: We'll Be There!
Iran: Be a walk in the park!
Saudi Arabia: Hey, we all like cheap petrol!
Plus there's the fact we're all reasonably well off here in Aus, excellent education and health systems, great democratic political system, fair moral sense.
So you can see there's a few reasons the terrorists might not like us, although, if they do come here, we can easily melt their hearts with our koala bears, or melt their skin with our radiant sun
It was the just RIAA removing a couple of infringing servers
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Imagine a beowolf cluster of-- FUCK, they're gone!!!!/I>
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Customs has been advised that the servers did not contain personal, business-related or national security information.
Okayy.... So just what was on them, then?
They were completely empty. Completely. They never were used to and never inteded to be used, ever. Ever. Seriously. They were shut off since they were bought in 1982 and never, never, ever used for anything secret or anything. Especially not for anything secret at ALL... I SWEAR! This is a complete non-story, please stop asking about it. Nothing to see, nothing to write about, just normal EDS maintence contract gone wrong on some completely unused servers, pretty standard stuff. Here, look at the monkey.
"You just gave out my root password! "
Liar. I've seen your password. It's eight asterisks.
"Derp de derp."
(Google for heist60.mpeg if above if slashdotted)
It's just been replaced by this little linux server over here.
-pyrrho
This reminds me of a story...
I live and work in a certain large Far Eastern city, which has quite a few major financial institutions.
Several of these institutions use Sun hardware.
One of these institutions found that on Monday morning, their production system didn't work.
A bit more investigation found that the CPUs (8, IIRC) had all been removed. Apparently, someone walked in over the weekend and then walked out with several thousand dollars worth of UltraSPARC IIs under his arm.
They made a bit of fuss about this, boosted their security, and bought a bunch of new CPUs.
Then, a couple of months later, they found that their production system wasn't working on a Monday morning...
Obligatory Simpson quote :
"If something goes wrong, blame the guy who doesn't speak English"
No, no, no, you've got it all wrong.
This is what really happened to them.
(That's a link to a 5MB mpeg, please be gentle, mirror and post a link!)