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Cosmo, the God who fell to Earth

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Re: Cosmo, the God who fell to Earth

#41
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your security is based on the kindness, and apathy, of strangers." I repeat that warning to anyone who has become just computer-savvy enough to use a computer as well as they drive their car. The tinfoil-hat jokes have tapered off, over the years, with the mainstream news coverage of stolen user information.

Just had a reminder of that this morning... Was doing a bit of routine maintenance on the server at work when I noticed repeated ssh login attempts appearing in the system logs... with usernames that clearly don't exist. Tracing the source ip address sent me to Beijing somewhere, so someone there was trying a port scan and random ssh login attempts. I've never really looked for this kind of interaction before, and I…

It is so common I'd be surprised if you weren't seeing these login attempts. Every ssh server I've run in the last 10 years has had this happen, even those without domain names. They must just scan random IPv4 addresses for anyone responding on port 22. It's the modern equivalent of wardialing.

Re: Cosmo, the God who fell to Earth

#42
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a Palm Pre2 last year on ebay and had to go into an AT&T store to activate it. The person helping me had a little trouble activating it, so he called AT&T support and got help so quickly without being asked stupid questions, I've been using his technique ever since. Whenever I call tech support of a company that has physical locations, I always start with: "Hello, my name is Kevin, I'm an associate with [com…

What do you do when they ask you access the intranet at the terminal that is obviously right infront of you?

"We're having computer problems onsite."
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