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Dell Computers Has Been Hacked

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Re: Dell Computers Has Been Hacked

#81

Post by pbhjpbhj »

nthitz wrote: post #11
cm2187 wrote: post #2

I don't know if it's related but I found something deeply worrying a couple of months ago. I purchased a laptop on Dell's website at my home address using a personal email and my personal paypal account. No reference anywhere to my job or employer. A couple of weeks later I receive a call from India on the mobile number provided to Dell, from a guy pretending to be from Dell (and he might have been) who wanted to dis…

Axciom, Epsilon and similar companies track your credit card purchases and correlate them with a profile of who they think you are. If you work for a large corporation that is probably easier to identify than a small one. http://www.acxiom.com/ http://www.epsilon.com/

It would surely be really easy if you purchase things at a company shop or cafeteria?

But the banks already know where your paycheck comes from ...

Re: Dell Computers Has Been Hacked

#82

Post by geocar »

Sven7 wrote: post #62
geocar wrote: post #46

It doesn't sound like Dell has been very effective here: likely attackers downloaded the database raw or it's one of their many contractors who log in remotely. Last time I saw that interface it was a web form that someone could access from any machine! This is serious. If you have customer data, you need to log access to that data, and you need to audit access to that data, and (very important!) you need to have a z…

Then Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page are responsible for a lot of things... But as long as they come and cry on stage about how we should trust them and help them make the world more "open and connected" I guess it makes it okay. If the NSA, Sony and the Director of the CIA can't protect their data, how am I supposed to realistically ensure less educated\tech savvy family members, customers, employees protect theirs?…

I think this attitude is a big part of the problem: Bugs aren't inevitable, not everything leaks, software doesn't have to be slow and bloating, and how were we supposed to know shouldn't be a defence.

I'm not happy about the status quo, and I'm becoming increasingly convinced that combining criticism and humility is the only way out.

Re: Dell Computers Has Been Hacked

#83

Post by tombrossman »

sampo wrote: post #69
rms_returns wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It already happens unofficially. How do you think banks assess your lending/borrowing habits when you apply for a loan? There are detective agencies who track credit cards and other things (like a few examples someone gave in this very thread).

> It already happens unofficially. European living in the US here. How do these systems assess recent immigrants who have no credit history in the US?

American living in Europe here. In some ways, having no credit history is worse than having bad credit. For example, when I signed up for my first 'post-paid' mobile contract, I had to put a much larger deposit down than my friends with bad credit did. Theirs was about $500 and mine was $1000.

Look at ways to establish at least some credit history sooner rather than later, as this will make things easier in the future. For example, even if you do not need a store credit card, you might get one and charge routine purchases and pay the full about each month. This avoids any extra costs and builds credit history.

Re: Dell Computers Has Been Hacked

#84

Post by krylon »

roflaway wrote: post #7

Throwaway account because I just shared this story with a buddy of mine: I, too, have received these "Dell" tech support calls and angrily yell at them as I hang up within 15seconds. Lately though, I received a bombardment of calls (15 to be exact) in the past 3 days from the same number. I answered the one of them, and it had the same 1minute 10s message saying to call the number back regarding a computer threat the…

It would be nice - not a solution, but an improvement nevertheless - if there was something like a "firewall" for phones, that allowed you to block calls based on the caller.

I have never been harassed like that, but I have often wished for a feature like that.

Re: Dell Computers Has Been Hacked

#85

Post by dcposch »

nthitz wrote: post #11
cm2187 wrote: post #2

I don't know if it's related but I found something deeply worrying a couple of months ago. I purchased a laptop on Dell's website at my home address using a personal email and my personal paypal account. No reference anywhere to my job or employer. A couple of weeks later I receive a call from India on the mobile number provided to Dell, from a guy pretending to be from Dell (and he might have been) who wanted to dis…

Axciom, Epsilon and similar companies track your credit card purchases and correlate them with a profile of who they think you are. If you work for a large corporation that is probably easier to identify than a small one. http://www.acxiom.com/ http://www.epsilon.com/

I assumed that when I buy something on a card, it's more or less private. The transaction should be known only to: me, the merchant, our respective banks, Visa, and I guess the IRS if they come and ask for it.

If I understand correctly, youre saying my entire purchase history is shared with random third party marketing companies. Full transaction data, PII included, no anonymization.

How is that even remotely OK?

Re: Dell Computers Has Been Hacked

#86

Post by eru »

ctstover wrote: post #28
eru wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. What's wrong with using something like Haskell or Rust? The security there is in the type system at compile time, no Trusted Computing shenanigans, and you still avoid buffer overflows and SQL injections (if you use them properly). Even something as lowly as Python mostly protects you from buffer overflows.

Regardless of the language, if it had a closed source runtime interpreter and/or VM that you forbade you from performing various sequences of operations on hardware that you "own", actively fought against you seeing what it was doing, etc - then you would no more be able to "trust" it than back-doored cryptography. (I'm getting sleeping, so that may sound wrong. Though it's been a popular troll/advocacy touch point s…

I assume you are sleepy.

What I am talking about is that some languages make writing safe code easier, that is code that behaves well as a program when compiled to machine language (or interpreted as is). Especially in the face of hostile inputs.

As an example, it is pretty hard to make your Python interpreter crash with a segfault using just pure Python code. (It is, of course, easy to generate a Python exception.)

Even though, this safety doesn't come at the expense of power: it is easy to tell the interpreter to get out of the way and let you muck around with raw bytes (ie by calling into C).

In the case of Python, the safety-by-default comes at the expense of performance. In the case of Haskell, it is either performance or program complexity. (Ie you can write fast Haskell code, but it looks weird.)

If you do call into something low level, it will be clearly visibly in your code that something potentially dangerous is going on.

Safe and correct behaviour by default is good. Profiling can help you find the few spots where you want to take over safety obligations from the automatic systems in return for extra performance.

Re: Dell Computers Has Been Hacked

#87

Post by eru »

DannoHung wrote: post #36
ctstover wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of the language, if it had a closed source runtime interpreter and/or VM that you forbade you from performing various sequences of operations on hardware that you "own", actively fought against you seeing what it was doing, etc - then you would no more be able to "trust" it than back-doored cryptography. (I'm getting sleeping, so that may sound wrong. Though it's been a popular troll/advocacy touch point s…

That is not what either Rust or Haskell are. It would behoove you to have a passing familiarity with what someone says before responding to them combatively

Thanks!

> That is not what either Rust or Haskell are.

Nor even Python.

Re: Dell Computers Has Been Hacked

#89

Post by sbarre »

dcposch wrote: post #85
nthitz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Axciom, Epsilon and similar companies track your credit card purchases and correlate them with a profile of who they think you are. If you work for a large corporation that is probably easier to identify than a small one. http://www.acxiom.com/ http://www.epsilon.com/

I assumed that when I buy something on a card, it's more or less private. The transaction should be known only to: me, the merchant, our respective banks, Visa, and I guess the IRS if they come and ask for it. If I understand correctly, youre saying my entire purchase history is shared with random third party marketing companies. Full transaction data, PII included, no anonymization. How is that even remotely OK?

That is correct. Banks and credit card companies merchandise this information to their partners, which leads to this kind of thing. Check your cards' terms of services if you want to be somewhat horrified.

Re: Dell Computers Has Been Hacked

#90

Post by keithpeter »

marklgr wrote: post #21
acomjean wrote: post #3

Am I the only one thinking that we've lost total control over the machines and data we've created. It seems like nothing is safe and or verifiable anymore. Add to this the backdrop of governments wanting backdoors. People calling you in the US pretending to be from the "IRS" and yet nothing is/ can be done about it? Maybe its really high time for C and its buffer overflows to go... And SQL injection. We're tech savy…

From one of the comments in the article, it's probably more like we've lost control of how businesses work. Many people don't like the phrase "race to the bottom", but that's what comes to mind when you get to see how personal data is handled to third parties and/or cheap, expendable workforce.

At that point, one would expect to see increasing regulation kick in. It did historically for other kinds of service, e.g. financial services, insurance, public transport &c.
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