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Hacks To Be Truly Paranoid About
snydeq writes: Nothing is safe, thanks to the select few hacks that push the limits of what we thought possible, InfoWorld's Roger Grimes writes in this roundup of hacks that could make even the most sane among us a little bit paranoid. "These extreme hacks rise above the unending morass of everyday, humdrum hacks because of what they target or because they employ previously unknown, unused, or advanced methods. They push the limit of what we security pros previously thought possible, opening our eyes to new threats and systemic vulnerabilities, all while earning the begrudging respect of those who fight malicious hackers."
None of these are new.
The only really worrisome one to me is the ATM card skimmers, because if you go to an unknown ATM, it's hard to know if it has a skimmer on top or not. Furthermore, it has increased dramatically over the past few years, up 300% from last year.
I submitted an article on the topic, but it was rejected. Bottom line: be careful when using ATMs, especially at bars and in Florida. Recently New York and Philadelphia have been increasingly targeted.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This stuff has been out there for more than two years for most of it except maybe the badusb. Go write a real news story and come back when you have something good...
The only thing that scares me is that you can buy a harddrive that might have it's firmware modified so they always have a backdoor into your system.
Be seeing you...
... I have heard of these before, but it's good to get a run-down.
Stuxnet is my fav. It reminds me of the "drunk walk" algorithm I entered into a TRS-80 using BASIC, back in 1978 and stuff.
As an IT person, reading the article was like looking up symptoms for an illness: I think I have every fatal disease and hackers are crawling all over my system.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Given the dozens and dozens of reported hacks against large orgs over the last 2 year, I can only conclude there is a large disregard for properly addressing security that starts right at the top of the C suite in big companies.
That is at least as troubling for smaller companies, who likely have less resources to deal with security.
Java, one of the most bug-filled, hackable software products the world
Indeed criticism should be leveled at Java for trying to retain one of it's original design intents of being a web safe sandbox while at the same time trying to be a golden hammer in pretty much every other problem/solution domains, server backend, rich client, embedded device etc meaning the platform got so huge and unwieldly it was too difficult to keep it secure if nothing because of it's sheer weight. But to call it the most hackable software products is just stupid and ignorant. Does the author understand the basic concept of memory management exploits? Buffer overruns exploits are virtually non-existant in Java, caused only by rare defects in the JVM itself.
"Most automated teller machines (ATMs) contain a computer that runs a popular OS, so it should come as no shock that they can be hacked. For the most part, this means Microsoft Windows"
..
:) ref
Nothing to disagree with so far
"ATM OSes often include an implementation of Java, one of the most bug-filled, hackable software products the world has ever known"
Only when run on top of Microsoft Windows. Sun Microsoft Systems were under the delusion that they owned Java. Originally designed to be a write-once-run-anywhere technology. At least before Microsoft innovated a Java Language Council(excluding Sun), took control of Java (JFC) and licensed it back to Sun (AFC)
Years later Oracle acquired Suns interest in Java and sued Google for including Java API calls in Android. Curiously enough Microsoft is 'licensing' patented Android technology to the handset manufacturers and Oracle isn't going after Microsoft.
Check this incident out. Naturally, Qubes could not protect him because his laptop did not have an IOMMU. But the real interesting thing to me is where/when this implant was actually put in his system (he says he bought it new, in person, and the symptoms appeared sometime after a period of normal behavior).
How many friggin' ways are there to hang shoes in your closet? You'd think that just piling your shoes on the floor has been holding us back all these years, and we're just beginning to get a handle on this shoe storage thing. Buy expensive plastic drawers, make things out of moldy cardboard, hang 'em and wrap 'em like flies in a spiderweb, on doors, above your bed. Make labels. How about an entire room full of wax people in various positions to wear our shoes for us? To select a pair just tip over the wax person and take their shoes off. Simple.
There is always some 'Target Number'. No one ever has a bright idea any more, they must save them up until there is a round or round-plus-one number. Only a brain dead doofus would click into '100 uses for a dead cat' when another article promises 101 uses.
Zero-Day Life Hacks are the worst. Mixed in with the rest, at a glance you can tell that they were made up on the spot to help the author achieve the target number, and are not worth the time spend reading them. And there is no way to unread them, no delivered punishment for this crime. The last time someone felt guilty about wasting another person's precious time was back in 1959.
Life hacks don't just present these tips, they go on about them. You can't just be told to slide a friggin' block of wood along the floor to help set molding at the proper height. There has to be a Using A Block Of Wood Smartly video, and there's always a FAQ with dumb questions like, when I slide it into a corner, what then? (start over in another room, maybe it will work there) and What if the wood falls over? (find another piece). Even the most ludicrous and contrived aspects of something generates lengthy discussion, as if we have carved out a Corner of the Universe devoted solely to wood block molding sliding. The comments slide off into oblivion and disappear like they do everywhere else, the Internet is now like a continuous roll of one-sided toilet paper.
The people surfing these 'Hacks' are really asking themselves, I have these opposeable thumbs connected to a brain. What are they for? Well one thing you could do is spend every spare moment of your life in a voyeuristic journey paging through Life Hacks. As the senses dull and the little voice in our head that says, "Now THAT's clever" becomes over-used, our desperate brains are spurting little endorphin rushes that represent the Eureka! moment, and for a split second we pretend to be filing away every Life Hack like some modern day Sherlock Holmes, to regurgitate it some day at the precise moment when it will attract that mate, save that marriage, save your life and impress everybody
The truth is that you are forgetting them as fast as you are absorbing them and your own brain is becoming that one-sided continuous roll of toilet paper. It's a scam and you are both scammer and scamee. When you go to bed tonight, try to remember all the valuable tips you've learned. Then in the morning. In the place of hands-on basic 'aboriginal skills' of problem solving with the use of fingernails, using levers, found objects and baling wire, things upon things --- we're just merely glancing at things
You know those night-time satellite photos that show cities, highways and towns as shimmering webs of light? Well in terms of average depth of human concentration... those lights are winking out. Celebrities who've had their asses reamed by hateful people on Twitter and delete their accounts (whoosh!) to go back to old-fashioned interviews and press conferences teach us an important lesson about modern culture and long term mental health... which I will not share. This is no 'Life Hack' tip here... figure it out yourself.
Life Hacks also eat up idle quiet time, in which the mind fits things together in silly ways that are uniquely your own. We must use the Internet -- to find the slow tides of thought, laughter and fable we wish to use to construct our worlds, and spend equal time out in the most desperate emotional wildernesses of our time, to tame them to our liking. Not passively surf 'Life Hacks'.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>