Currently reading his second book, the Art of Intrusion. Finished his first book, the Art of Deception, long ago.
Unlike his first book, the Art of Intrusion is mainly a collection of true stories of hackers and their accounts of some of their exploits.
Although I've not completed the entire book, I'm already convinced that even SID isn't secure enough if nothing has changed since I left.
And that is despite the fact that I recognize a number of the precautions described in his books and that there are many security measures that they take there which I do not see outside of Mindef Gombak Base.
It's that scary.
In fact, if SID is one of the most secured places in Singapore, then nowhere on this island is truly safe.
What concerns me most is the social engineering, that a lot of the stories showed that hackers do not use hacking alone to accomplish their goals.
Social engineering can often make employees reveal useful information that may not seem sensitive to the employees themselves.
Like Kevin Mitnick mentioned in the above video, "all it takes is just one person inside the company to make a bad decision, and the hacker is in."
A very basic mistake that I used to make was to assume that anyone who knew the number of our phones had to be one of us and most likely had the security clearance for whatever he/she is asking.
It's quite embarassing, really.
Hopefully they've corrected this mistake at the very least.
On a more positive note, at least we never allowed anyone to scan their passes to let someone else enter unless it was a special guest whose clearance has been checked beforehand. No holding the door open for another person. That mistake was mentioned in both books which leads me to believe this is a pretty common one.
In a story that involved this in the Art of Intrusion, the intruder held the door open for the employee when they left the cafe after lunch, so the latter did the same for him in the office. Once he was inside, he only needed a fake pass that looked real and he had free access to everything.
From what I've read, I think the best precaution to take against social engineering is to be unhelpful. I know it sounds bad for any working environment, but most of the social engineering tricks described in his books actually rely on the instinctive urge in people to be kind to each other and to reciprocate kindness.
Nothing to see here. Just some maids passing through.
It wasn't hard because the cable was almost as wide as his feet. The only possible difficulty was a fear of heights.
Wait what?
Poor guy. Even his boss is laughing.
10 hours of just the good part of the song, Run Away. Original song below, but you aren't missing anything anyway.
The violin part's good too but I guess it's less popular and harder to loop.
I herd u liek phones, so I put a phone in ur phone so you can phone while you phone.
Began camping on Day 16 in Die2Nite. We're now down to 16 after 8 of us died last night (and 5 terrorised).
Since there are now less than 20 of us, the total number of zombies attacking residents inside the town will no longer be limited (though the number of zombies attacking the town will remain unaffected). Staying in the town tonight is going to be suicide - over 4000 zombies are expected to visit us at 00:00hr later.
The above limit is a new change in Season 3.
We've now formed groups of 3-4 and hiding in buildings because Season 3 also heavily penalises the survival chances in open zones with no buildings.
However someone who camped in the open now suggests that this penalty only applies to devastated towns, ie what our town will become after tonight, because his chances tonight are still "decent" which is the highest grade possible.
If true, then we've just reduced our survival chances for tonight needlessly, although my chances are also "decent" despite being the last to hide (first to camp in their hiding spot gets better chances, gradually reduces for each successive campers) out of the three of us.
Nevertheless, we have plenty of defensive objects (DOs) in town which we can bring (1 per person) to improve our chances everyday, and over 40 water rations in the bank, so we can survive indefinitely.
The only real problem is that our chances of camping is reduced for every night we spend outside of town.
Despite of this, we're now the top town in the game and it does not appear as if we're going to drop anytime soon. The town which was previously first had a poorly organized camping strategy involving spreading everyone out in the open, resulting in lots of death the first night. They probably thought the penalty for camping outside was lesser than the penalty for having everyone camping in the same buildings.
Well, we'll find out the truth tonight, but we're sure our strategy is better.
It's so awesome to know I helped by never failing to bring either a DO or jerrycan back to town everyday. We were so good at scavenging we had over 30 jerrycans on Day 13 or 14 and they were discussing whether we should bother to use them since we weren't short on water anyway. In the end, we thought we might as well use them just for the heck of it.
Hence the 40-something water rations in the bank.
...
Survived! The town now has 555 points, way more than the current second best town.
No comments:
Post a Comment