Category: Computer Security

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Emerald City Comicon’s website was hacked and deleted this week…along with all their backups.

Ouch.

Ticketing is all handled offsite by EventBrite, so tickets and financial info are safe. They’ve redirected their URL to the Facebook page while they rebuild their website.

Lesson learned: Isolate your backups.

I don’t just mean physically. Yes, you need to keep some offsite in case the reason you lost your server is that the building caught fire. But isolate the online access as well. If you back up your site by pushing the backups from your server to a remote location (either self-hosted or cloud storage like Dropbox or Amazon S3), those credentials are stored on your server somehow. What could an attacker do with them?

Consider: If someone breaks into your web server, what else can they do in addition to vandalizing your site? Can they access other databases? Can they hop onto your internal network? Retrieve or alter private files? Can they get at your backups? If so, can they get at all your backups including private documents?

The answers are going to depend on your network and backup setup. But they’re questions you need to start asking.

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Comic strips and art:

Sci-fi and fantasy:

  • Keeping Up With the Cardassians. For months, this is what I heard every time someone mentioned the Kardashians. (What can I say? My brain is more attuned to Star Trek than to reality TV.)
  • Author Robert J. Sawyer answers pointed questions about Flashforward and the TV adaptation, including what went wrong. I have to agree that it was really hurt by focusing too heavily on the conspiracy arc.

Coolness!

Tech stuff:

  • Gmail accidentally reset thousands of accounts last month. (They got it back — this is Google after all.) I’ve come to rely heavily on Gmail, but I still keep a local copy of all my email in case something like this happens. (Engadget, via @pobox)
  • Mobile Content Is Twice as Difficult (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  • Map of smartphone marketshare by OS & manufacturer [dead link]. It’s a 3-way split between iPhone, Android and Blackberry. iPhone & Blackberry are of course each one manufacturer, while Android is divided mainly among HTC, Samsung and Motorola. (via @androidandme)

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Catching up on linkblogging.

Comic Strips

  • I found a printout of this User Friendly comic strip while cleaning out my old desk last month. Ah, tech support! Help, I can’t send e-mail!
  • XKCD on spambots vs. constructive comments (warning: language)
  • Two comic strips about book collections: Wondermark and Girl Genius. I stumbled on the Wondermark strip at Long Beach Comic-Con (write-up should be done today is online) and it really hit home, between the fact that I grew up loving books for exactly this reason, and the impending arrival of the next generation. As for Girl Genius, I think Castle Heterodyne’s library could give the Beast’s a run for its money.
  • Fake Science explains the difference between regular and decaf coffee. Insert obligatory “It was ground this morning” joke.
  • C-Section Comics shows the difference between iPhone, Android and Blackberry users. For the record: Android user, picked up the link from an iPhone user. Hmm…

Photos

Other Stuff

  • Someone wants to buy a cosmic treadmill from me: Umm…Not For Sale?
  • Wrapping up Cyber Security Awareness Month at the Internet Storm Center. If you use a computer, you should at least take the time to look through this.
  • Gotta love the MPAA’s priorities. A brief scene of therapeutic swearing earns the same rating as an entire film full of graphic, gruesome torture: The King’s Speech vs. Saw 3D.

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If Your Password is “123456”, Just Make it “HackMe” (New York Times). Security researchers examine a list of 32 million passwords stolen from RockYou, and the most common are…well…pathetic. Things like “123456” (the most common), “abc123”, “password” and even “rockyou” (seriously!)

There’s been some slight improvement in the past decade, when the most common password was “12345” (the kind of combination an idiot has on his luggage). Now it’s got a whole extra digit. (Whee.)

Hmm, I wonder where “Chuck Norris” appears on the list?

(via @dixonium)