Ramblings & ephemera
From Paul J. Zak’s “How to Run a Con” (Psychology Today: 13 November 2008):
When I was in high school, I took a job at an ARCO gas station on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California. At the time, I drove a 1967 Mustang hotrod and thought I might pick up some tips and cheap parts [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, business, science, security | No Comments »
From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007):
Dollar-Revenue and GimmyCash are two companies that have paid for installation of their Adware programs. Each has a pay rate formula based on the country of installation. Dollar-Revenue pays 30 cents for installing their adware in a U. S. [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “Hacking Computers Over USB” (Crypto-Gram: 15 June 2005):
From CSO Magazine:
“Plug an iPod or USB stick into a PC running Windows and the device can literally take over the machine and search for confidential documents, copy them back to the iPod or USB’s internal storage, and hide them as “deleted” files. Alternatively, the [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security, technology | Comments Off
From Tom Stites’s “Guest Posting: Is Media Performance Democracy’s Critical Issue?” (Center for Citizen Media: Blog: 3 July 2006):
And then there were [Walter] Annenberg’s political shenanigans – he shamelessly used his news columns [in The Philadelphia Inquirer] to embarrass candidates who dared to run against his favorites. One day in 1966 a Democrat named Milton [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, language & literature, politics | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s “News” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 April 2006):
Undercover investigators were able to smuggle radioactive materials into the U.S. It set off alarms at border checkpoints, but the smugglers had forged import licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, based on an image of the real document they found on the Internet. Unfortunately, the border agents [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, security | Comments Off
From The Inquirer’s “Killer phrase will fill your PC with spam”:
THERE IS ONE phrase which, if you type into any search engine will expose your PC to shed-loads of spam, according to a new report.
Researchers Ben Edelman and Hannah Rosenbaum reckon that typing the phrase “Free Screensavers” into any search engine is the equivalent of [...]
Posted on May 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security, technology | Comments Off
From CAIDA’s “The Spread of the Witty Worm“:
On Friday March 19, 2004 at approximately 8:45pm PST, an Internet worm began to spread, targeting a buffer overflow vulnerability in several Internet Security Systems (ISS) products, including ISS RealSecure Network, RealSecure Server Sensor, RealSecure Desktop, and BlackICE. The worm takes advantage of a security flaw in [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security | Comments Off
From Information Week’s’ “ Trojan Snags World Of Warcraft Passwords To Cash Out Accounts“:
A new password-stealing Trojan targeting players of the popular online game “World of Warcraft” hopes to make money off secondary sales of gamer goods, a security company warned Tuesday.
MicroWorld, an Indian-based anti-virus and security software maker with offices in the U.S., [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, security, technology | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s “Automobile Identity Theft“:
This scam was uncovered in Israel:
1. Thief rents a car.
2. An identical car, legitimately owned, is found and its “identity” stolen.
3. The stolen identity is applied to the rented car and is then offered for sale in a newspaper ad.
4. Innocent buyer purchases the car from the thief as a [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security | Comments Off
From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (399):
No wheeze was too old for [John Bankhead] Magruder to employ it. One morning he sent a column along a road that was heavily wooded except for a single gap in plain view of the enemy outposts. All day the gray files swept past in [...]
Posted on April 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (384):
When [Pierre Gustave Toutant de Beauregard's men] stole out of the intrenchments [at Corinth] after nightfall, they left dummy guns in the embrasures and dummy cannoneers to serve them, fashioned by stuffing ragged uniforms with straw. A single band moved up and down the deserted [...]
Posted on April 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From “Operations of the Western Flotilla” by Henry A. Walke, Commander of the Carondelet, describing the Battle of Island Number Ten:
Having received written orders from the flag-officer, under date of March 30th, I at once began to prepare the Carondelet for the ordeal. All the loose material at hand was collected, and on the 4th [...]
Posted on April 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | Comments Off
From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (287-288):
[At the Battle of Pea Ridge,] they saw the rebels coming, yelling and firing as they came, hundreds of them bearing down to complete the wreckage their artillery had begun. As the Federals fell back from their shattered pieces an Iowa cannoneer paused to toss [...]
Posted on April 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, history, security | Comments Off
From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (244):
[Lincoln's Secretary of War Edwin McMasters] Stanton had done devious things in his time. A corporation lawyer, he delighted also in taking criminal cases when these were challenging and profitable enough. His fees were large and when one prospective client protested, Stanton asked, “Do you [...]
Posted on April 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | Comments Off
From The Atlantic’s “Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?” (February 1982):
The diamond invention - the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem - is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history | Comments Off
From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (138):
[John Slidell] was aptly named, being noted for his slyness. At the outbreak of hostilities, back in the spring, an English journalist called him, “a man of iron will and strong passions, who loves the excitement of combinations and who, in his dungeon, or whatever [...]
Posted on April 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature | Comments Off
From Computerworld’s “Florida banks hacked in new spoofing attack“:
Three Florida banks have had their Web sites compromised by hackers in an attack that security experts are calling the first of its type.
Earlier this month, attackers were able to hack servers run by the Internet service provider that hosted the three banks’ Web sites. They then [...]
Posted on April 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | Comments Off
From Edward Felten’s “Acoustic Snooping on Typed Information“:
Li Zhuang, Feng Zhou, and Doug Tygar have an interesting new paper showing that if you have an audio recording of somebody typing on an ordinary computer keyboard for fifteen minutes or so, you can figure out everything they typed. The idea is that different keys tend to [...]
Posted on April 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security, writing ideas | Comments Off
From The New York Times‘ “1 Cafe, 1 Gas Station, 2 Roads: America’s Emptiest County“:
At last count (by Sheriff Hopper toting it up in his head), 16 people make Mentone their home and 55 others are spread throughout the rest of Loving County’s 645 square miles of parched, salty West Texas grassland and rattlesnakes  [...]
Posted on February 25th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, politics | Comments Off
From Network Magazine:
Ken Thompson, a designer of the Unix OS, explained his magic password, a password that once allowed him to log in as any user on any Unix system, during his award acceptance speech at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) meeting in 1984. Thompson had included a backdoor in the password checking function [...]
Posted on November 29th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, security, technology | Comments Off