Tweets Worth Mentioning April 14, 2014
This is just an awesome account, especially for those who work in IT.
A breach is not a 'hack'
On Saturday my wife burst into my our game room to tell me that South Carolina suffered another breach. It was all over Facebook via WLTX. Here's the headline:
Another Hack; More South Carolinians Potentially at Risk - by WLTX
/facepalm
Aside from the salacious headline, the article doesn't tell you anything. This passes for news? My gosh. No wonder local media outlets are struggling. They're essentially tabloids.
Yes, Experian has had a BREACH of their customer data. It wasn't a 'hack' per se. Instead Experian bought out a data brokerage firm, which sells and buys people's personal information, called Court Ventures. The BREACH occurred when a Vietnamese identity theft ring was posing as a private investigative service purchasing personally identifiable information (PII) from Court Ventures. Essentially, once Court Ventures was bought out by Experian, and Experian didn't vet Court Ventures processes or clients, the Vietnamese identity theft ring got access to Experian's customer data.
I would highly recommend the link below if you want more details on the BREACH. This isn't just South Carolinians PII this is all Experian customers PII.
Experian ID Theft Exposed 200M Consumer Records - Matthew J. Schwartz - Dark Reading
This is just another example of why I don't get my new from local media outlets.
MLB's Pressbox WiFi password scheme
The Houston Astros have a new information board for the press box. It includes the day's schedule, lineups, game notes, upcoming probables, and the pressbox wifi info:
Woops! That’s the SSID and password for the pressbox WiFi. The password would have taken 4-6 days to crack with offline cracking password, but it’s now 0 days considering it’s on the internet.
Media members need to be very careful what they’re communicating out and teams need to be careful what they’re displaying for those media members to communicate out. I did inform the Astros about this and it appears they’ve removed the pressbox WiFi information from the TV display, per another journalists tweet that was taken at a different angle.
But I’ve seen the pressbox password WiFi somewhere before
Security tip: When being interviewed on TV, make sure passwords aren't written behind you - Graham Cluley
Interesting, not only does it appear that SSID’s are shared among MLB ball parks it appears they have a particular scheme for both the SSID and password that get updated yearly with only a one character change. I don’t know that they use that same scheme for every ball park, but it’s in at least two stadiums and likely several more.
Is this a big deal?
It’s not a huge deal, if MLB and the ball clubs have segmented the WiFi network from their internal network, which I would assume they do. Criminal’s are looking for the easiest way to make money and this would be a risky-targeted attack on, for the most part, journalists that probably isn’t likely to be all that profitable. Still, the WiFi network is password for a reason and I don’t think MLB or journalists, for that matter, want unauthorized people getting into their systems.
Awful "Cyber" Images
"Cyber" images are some of the funniest images around. Take for example this tweet:
I really don't know where to start with this. There's just all sorts of wrong here. Take the ski mask for instance.
Who wears a ski mask when they're at a computer?
Unless you're using a laptop while you're flying down the slopes of some mountain, I imagine it's quite uncomfortable to wear while using a computer.
Then there's the extremely pixelated (Minecraft?) laser blowing up the hackers computer screen into green pixelated pieces.
Oh and the money. Hackers always have a pile of cash sitting right next to their computers.