Articles tagged as "security"

I couldn’t believe how supremely difficult it is to securely use VNC to access an OSX mac remotely.  Turns out that by default, using a standard VNC client (as opposed to an Apple Remote Desktop client) does not afford you an option to have the physical console lock when someone connects to the VNC server.  Some third-party clients make this an option, but all that I could find were paid VNC clients that support it.  It is somewhat ridiculous that this setting is left to the client rather than enforced on the server, but I digress…

Had to share this hilarious voice-mail I received from an IRS scammer (happened to come in with Unknown caller ID – I read online that others had been spoofing US phone numbers for caller ID in the past). The transcript does not do it justice.  I laughed out loud when I heard the phrase, “and you get arrested” as that is precisely what one would expect to hear from the IRS.

As I’ve used Twitter more, I’ve noticed how many of the shared URLs are shortened. And to think that the Library of Congress is archiving all US tweets, how many will actually be usable at some point in the future? Hopefully their process logs the resolved actual URL instead of the shortened one. When I restored my blog, it was amazing how many broken links I found. I stopped fixing them. That’s just the regular web. Adding URL shortening is another level of indirection that is also another failure point.

I searched and didn’t find a Seattle-specific Information Security calendar showing not only conferences, but smaller security events.  So I created a new public one.  And I guess that means now I’m maintaining one ;-)

07:00

I noticed that one of the throw-away email addresses I registered years ago for sony style product registration and accessories is now receiving spam.  Was sony compromised or did they have an insider sell their addresses?  Who knows…  I know that I didn’t give it out to anyone…

This kind of thing was going on long before “phishing” was coined. It’s the same thing in a different technology medium.

Boing Boing: Craigslist hoax ad leads to destroyed home