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Child tweets gibberish from US nuclear-agency account

bbc.com

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Re: Child tweets gibberish from US nuclear-agency account

#111

Post by filoleg »

ziddoap wrote: post #81
panzagl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you do is take a screenshot of whatever's open on their computer, close it, then set the screenshot as their desktop wallpaper. Also hide their icons for good measure. This should start a cycle of escalation and retaliation that eventually gets the whole office locking their PCs.

In the past, for me, this has caused needless friction and fostered an adversarial relationship between IT/security staff and everyone else. We weighed our options and decided that it was a battle we would rather not waste our effort and risk staff animosity with. When a more serious security incident occurs, or when we decide to implement something else that may require staff effort, we believe that our staff will b…

It can be done in a bit less adversarial and nicer way than making them deal with an annoyance of "troubleshooting" their desktop. Which, I found, makes things much easier and more frictionless.

In my old office, we had this team "tradition" that was supposed to encourage people to lock their desktops. If they left their office for whatever reason and left their desktop unlocked, anyone from the team jumps up to the machine. Then they send an email to the rest of the team on behalf of the person who left their desktop unlocked, saying that they are bringing cookies to share with the team tomorrow.

It worked out well for quite a few years, with people being more mindful about locking their machines. And their "punishment" for not doing so was just sharing cookies with the rest of the team the day after and hearing a couple of jokes about the situation. Overall, very positive experience, no one got upset about anything, because their machines themselves weren't screwed with, their work productivity wasn't lost due to it, and everyone shared a moment and baked goods.

Re: Child tweets gibberish from US nuclear-agency account

#113

Post by whatshisface »

xwdv wrote: post #105
unclemase wrote: post #3

I love Canada now more than ever. https://ibb.co/TWnNdGJ

Canada didn’t write that, it was their social media account manager, which might be outsourced to a firm. It might even be the same person who manages the United States account.

The Canadian government has a culture, which is related to Canadian culture, and both of them have a lot of influence over what is considered acceptable to post on their twitter account. Therefore, a tweet on an account publicly associated with them reveals information about the culture of Canada.

Re: Child tweets gibberish from US nuclear-agency account

#114

Post by bombcar »

c0nsumer wrote: post #91
bombcar wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Causes all sorts of hell with Remote Desktop, however. But it’s the right direction. For those with a Mac and an Apple Watch you can make the watch automatically lock and unlock based on Bluetooth distance.

How so? In my experience you are prompted to use it, and you can click and use standard credentials if desired. I deployed WHfB at our $LARGE_ENTERPRISE and opted against using BT RSSI as a trusted signal because it's just too unpredictable. Probably because the Windows space is much more varied, but an RSSI that'd work for one device at ~8' away would fail to lock another when two cube rows away. Meaning, we knew us…

I enabled Hello on my VM Windows 10 Enterprise and then was unable to connect via Remote Desktop from my Mac - so it didn't have single sign-on but it wouldn't fall back to anything I could use. So I disabled it and now it's happy.

Re: Child tweets gibberish from US nuclear-agency account

#115

Post by bombcar »

saghm wrote: post #101
bombcar wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Mac takes so long to come back to a usable state after sleep that I only lock when I’ll be away for a long period of time.

Is there a power setting that makes it not suspend when it's idle? I'm not sure about MacOS, but on my Linux desktop there's a toggle in the power settings to make turn that behavior off, so I can lock my screen without having to worry about suddenly losing the ability to ssh into it.

I've done that - but even coming from just "display sleep" seems to cause it to go "HOLY SHIT I HAVE A DISPLAY! AND ANOTHER ONE! AND ANOTHER ONE! OH MY GOSH THERE'S A FOURTH?!? AND A FIFTH!?!?"

And then it calms down and all is well unless the cable decides not to connect at full speed, and I get to cycle it.

Re: Child tweets gibberish from US nuclear-agency account

#116

Post by jeffreyrogers »

I don't see how this is as big a deal as people make it out to be. The person in charge of this account probably has nothing to do with anything that remotely matters. You wouldn't worry about your 401k if the asset manager's twitter account posted some gibberish.

Re: Child tweets gibberish from US nuclear-agency account

#117

Post by taejo »

gnulinux wrote: post #109
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please. This is a social media manager who’s working from home that we’re talking about here. On the basis of these facts alone I can be relatively confident that the U.S. nuclear posture wasn’t seriously in jeopardy.

This is a genuine question, I'm really curious. What if the kid typed something that implies "US is firing nukes to {insert random non-Western country}". What is the probability of something like that escalating?

It wouldn't be completely unprecedented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_begin_bombing_in_five_minut...

Re: Child tweets gibberish from US nuclear-agency account

#118

Post by smt88 »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #116

I don't see how this is as big a deal as people make it out to be. The person in charge of this account probably has nothing to do with anything that remotely matters. You wouldn't worry about your 401k if the asset manager's twitter account posted some gibberish.

What if the child were a little older and typed something related to launching missiles as a joke?

Re: Child tweets gibberish from US nuclear-agency account

#119

Post by lostmsu »

ziddoap wrote: post #9
airhead969 wrote: post #2

Isn't the automatic reaction of a Windows desktop/laptop user to lock their workstation (Ctrl-Alt-Del, Enter, Enter) if they leave for any reason? Edit: that was a great Chaos Monkey to reiterate security hygiene. Or was it a Mini Chaos Monkey? https://netflix.github.io/chaosmonkey/

>Isn't the automatic reaction of a Windows desktop/laptop user to lock their workstation Having attempted to encourage this as a habit for my users for about a year, and not a single one doing it, I've had to come up with other solutions that takes it out of their hands. (It's not business-critical for us, however we try to encourage good security habits all around). So no, I don't think it is an automatic reaction f…

Windows had "Dynamic lock" for a while now, which would automatically lock PC when a Bluetooth device goes out of range (e.g. typically smartphone or smartwatch).

Can't it be required by a group policy?

Re: Child tweets gibberish from US nuclear-agency account

#120

Post by kirubakaran »

apetresc wrote: post #95
xiphias2 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Important accounts shouldn't be handled by 1 person, there should always be another one who can approve it.

Do you consider the Twitter account an "important account" that needs multi-party approval?

We could have another https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_begin_bombing_in_five_minut... situation
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