I actually made SharkTank with this one a few years ago:
The assignment looks simple enough, says this Web developer pilot fish at a medium-size Midwestern university: Take the annual survey given to incoming freshmen, convert it to a Web page and give academic advisers easy access to the results.
"The survey gave the advising department valuable information on each student's academic history, what they were interested in studying, and their extracurricular activities," fish says. So the technology is simple, but the value to the advisers is high.
Fish designs the Web form so the student data will be inserted into a database. Then on the administrative end, he writes code to convert that data into an Adobe Acrobat report.
"And I made sure the administrative end was brain-dead simple," fish says. "I gave the users in the advising office one Web page that had one text box and one submit button. Instructions were printed in a large, bold font at the top of the page: 'To view a student's survey, enter the student number in the box and click the submit button.'
"After clicking the button, the report was generated and displayed in a separate window, so they could save or print it or just read it on their screens. The box would only accept digits and only nine of them, the exact length of a student number. Again, brain-dead simple and foolproof.
"Or so I thought."
But the day after the application rolls out, fish gets a call from the head of the advising department.
"She loved the whole process," says fish, "but wanted me to come talk to all of the academic advisers. They had questions about it."
Fish figures the questions must be about the Web form that the students fill out, so he sets up a training session in a lab, just for the advisers.
"Instead, I spent an hour with 30 advisers showing them how to enter a number into that one text box and push that one button," fish groans.
"When I returned to my office and related to my co-workers how I had just lost an hour of my life, they didn't believe me.
"That was when I received an e-mail from the head of advising -- praising me up and down for being so helpful in training her staff on the use of the administrative interface."
I've been begging for Charter to do this too. We get thousands of attacks a week because too many nimrods are infected with everything from Code Red to MyDoom. It is not the ISP's responsibility to inform you that your machine is fubar, it's called personal responsibility!
The analogy I use to explain this to EU's is: Would you drive a car without knowing what type of fuel it takes? Where the pedals are? If it's an automatic or a manual? Then why would you use a computer without at least the most basic knowledge like antivirus software, or knowing NOT to open unknown attachments, or doing something so simple as running Windoze Update a couple of times a month?!
You don't leave your front door wide open when you go on vacation, so don't leave your computer bent over and grabbing it's ankles in the prison shower!
You can have a pissing contest all damn day if you want to - no OS is infallible. It doesn't matter if you wrote the OS yourself - if nobody took the time to do basic security on it - not to mention physical security, it's immaterial.
Until security is taken seriously, this will happen regularly. The difference is - we heard about this one.
And Bill; so what? Small fish like your clients aren't attractive enough targets, THAT'S why you haven't been 'hacked'.
So a fictional character is on the cathedral. Big whoop. There's a bunch more inside that place - like the putz hanging on that lower case t they got, that Jesus dude...
Why not have a little fun with the christians - they're dumb enough to follow some putz who never existed, why not add some Sci-fi to the mix?!
At last, the Dark Side gets a little recognition on this puny planet!
Slashdot Mirror
I actually made SharkTank with this one a few years ago:
The assignment looks simple enough, says this Web developer pilot fish at a medium-size Midwestern university: Take the annual survey given to incoming freshmen, convert it to a Web page and give academic advisers easy access to the results.
"The survey gave the advising department valuable information on each student's academic history, what they were interested in studying, and their extracurricular activities," fish says. So the technology is simple, but the value to the advisers is high.
Fish designs the Web form so the student data will be inserted into a database. Then on the administrative end, he writes code to convert that data into an Adobe Acrobat report.
"And I made sure the administrative end was brain-dead simple," fish says. "I gave the users in the advising office one Web page that had one text box and one submit button. Instructions were printed in a large, bold font at the top of the page: 'To view a student's survey, enter the student number in the box and click the submit button.'
"After clicking the button, the report was generated and displayed in a separate window, so they could save or print it or just read it on their screens. The box would only accept digits and only nine of them, the exact length of a student number. Again, brain-dead simple and foolproof.
"Or so I thought."
But the day after the application rolls out, fish gets a call from the head of the advising department.
"She loved the whole process," says fish, "but wanted me to come talk to all of the academic advisers. They had questions about it."
Fish figures the questions must be about the Web form that the students fill out, so he sets up a training session in a lab, just for the advisers.
"Instead, I spent an hour with 30 advisers showing them how to enter a number into that one text box and push that one button," fish groans.
"When I returned to my office and related to my co-workers how I had just lost an hour of my life, they didn't believe me.
"That was when I received an e-mail from the head of advising -- praising me up and down for being so helpful in training her staff on the use of the administrative interface."
I've been begging for Charter to do this too. We get thousands of attacks a week because too many nimrods are infected with everything from Code Red to MyDoom. It is not the ISP's responsibility to inform you that your machine is fubar, it's called personal responsibility!
The analogy I use to explain this to EU's is: Would you drive a car without knowing what type of fuel it takes? Where the pedals are? If it's an automatic or a manual? Then why would you use a computer without at least the most basic knowledge like antivirus software, or knowing NOT to open unknown attachments, or doing something so simple as running Windoze Update a couple of times a month?!
You don't leave your front door wide open when you go on vacation, so don't leave your computer bent over and grabbing it's ankles in the prison shower!
Since when does that matter?
You can have a pissing contest all damn day if you want to - no OS is infallible. It doesn't matter if you wrote the OS yourself - if nobody took the time to do basic security on it - not to mention physical security, it's immaterial.
Until security is taken seriously, this will happen regularly. The difference is - we heard about this one.
And Bill; so what? Small fish like your clients aren't attractive enough targets, THAT'S why you haven't been 'hacked'.
So a fictional character is on the cathedral. Big whoop. There's a bunch more inside that place - like the putz hanging on that lower case t they got, that Jesus dude...
Why not have a little fun with the christians - they're dumb enough to follow some putz who never existed, why not add some Sci-fi to the mix?!
At last, the Dark Side gets a little recognition on this puny planet!
Joke em' if they can't take a phuc.