http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2007-02-14-teacher-porn_x.htm
This is about the worst I can think of.
Short version: substitute teacher uses computer filled to the brink with malware. It redirects the class to porn sites. She gets charged and convicted, with penalties of up to 40 years in prison.
When I did Word support, I would get this call at least a couple of times per week:
“You guys suck! We have a million-dollar proposal coming up in one hour, and I lost my document! I’ve been working on it for a week, it was 300 pages, and without it we’ll lose that million dollars. If you don’t get my document back right now, we’ll sue you for everything you’ve got!”
“No problem, ma’am, let’s open up the copy that you last saved.”
“Saved?”
Similar deal, many years ago I maintained printers for a large company. Every now and then, the print queue would get jammed up and we'd have to reset them. Work would be lost. So many people got pissed at us because they'd lose their precious documents. When asked if they'd saved them, they'd go all blank, then get even more pissed.
It's OK though, it's not like they needed to be computer savvy. The company? IBM.I bought 2 Lacie lego brick style external hard drives (totaling 1 terabyte worth of storage). I had decided to rip all of my CDs and put the audio on these so I could put the CDs in storage. The first one was almost full and I had only gotten through the letter “C” alphabetically. I needed a couple songs off of it and connected it to my laptop as I sat on the couch in the living room. Unfortunately, the length of the USB cord was equivalent to my attention span and when someone came to the door, I moved my laptop and the external hard drive tumbled 2 feet to the carpeted floor. I plug it back in only to hear the dreaded “click, click click…”
Now I have to start from scratch again.
Warnings from both the manufacturer of the email software and the anti-virus software manufacturer to NOT scan the email database file with the AV software. Scanning of other files was generally ok, scanning of the email itself was done with the other piece of software that we had paid good money for and that had been designed to do so.
Everybody who was supposed to touch our servers knew this bit of information. Virus makes it into our network somehow. One of the network engineers decides that instead of getting the server admins, he would just scan all the servers. Including, yes, the email database file. Not surprisingly, the darn thing is corrupted and email for the division is gone.
For more fun, the backup and recovery solution for this email server was inadequate and would take forever to restore anything. The problem is made worse by management’s refusal to limit mailbox sizes and a refusal to allow the IT staff to force email into pst files off of the server.
It took two weeks and a $20,000 purchase order to a data recovery company to get everything back. The upside was that management suddenly took everything I said seriously, because I had been predicting this exact scenario for two years. They decided that maybe they should listen to their IT staff. Which is nice, because in many places the person that caused the problem would have been fired, and I would have probably been fired for not preventing what I had been telling them was inevitable.
This happened to someone I know:
Company moves into nice new building. Building includes nice new air-conditioned server room for servers. Things hum along nicely during the warm weather, but eventually fall comes and things cool off, as normal. Building switches from cooling to heating, and the servers start crashing.
Seems they’d forgotten to install a separate cooling and heating system for the servers’ very different needs! This led to three months of construction, with holes in the ceiling and all…
My home desktop was in desperate need of an upgrade. I was running a single core AMD 1.3ghz processor on a computer I built back in '01. I went on Newegg and priced out all the components for a new system. 3.0 Ghz dual core processor, new MB, RAM, high end video card, new high quality power supply, and a 600 gig HD. I decided to reuse my case and two DVD burners.
I carefully pulled all the guts out of the case and reinstalled the new system. I powered it up and it worked - right away! The last machine I built took about 8 hrs worth of updates and driver installs, but that was running on Win 98. XP, just made everything go smooth. I was in heaven. I ran out and bought the Orange Box, since my old computer couldn’t handle Half Life 2, and I was dying to play it.
Loaded it up and it worked great! Maxed out the graphics and it still ran smooth. Then, after playing for about 2hrs, I get a message “Windows is shutting down” and it shut down.
I pushed the power button, it started booting up, and after about 10-15secs, it shut down. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Push button 5 times in rapid succession out of frustration… computer boots up!
Huh. Oh well, back to HL2. Played some portal, life was good.
I needed to copy a DVD, so I put the source and destination discs in, hit copy and walked away. I came back to check on it an hour later, the computer was off.
I pushed the power button, it started booting up, and after about 10-15secs, it shut down. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Push button 5 times in rapid succession out of frustration… computer boots up!
I try to copy the DVD again, this time I watched. After about 15 mins, it shut off.
I pushed the power button, it started booting up, and after about 10-15secs, it shut down. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Push button 5 times in rapid succession out of frustration…nothing.
I started unplugging components. One optical drive, then the other. Remove one stick of RAM. Switch to the other stick. Unplug HD. Nothing worked. Reseated CPU, she booted to the BIOS. I shut it down and reinstalled everything, it booted up! I tried to copy a DVD, it shut down.
I reseated the CPU about 10 times with varying degrees of success.
I removed the MB and checked for shorts.
I tried everything I could think of for about 2 weeks. Sometimes it would boot up, sometimes it would not. Sometimes it would stay on for hours, sometimes for minutes.
I was frustrated and angry. I had just dropped a shit ton of money on a system that I could not get working. I kept hearing the words of my brother in my head, “Sure, you can save some money building your own, but if you buy it from Dell, you get a warranty and free service.”
I finally had to get away from the thing and clear my head. Newegg has a 30 day return policy. I was coming up on the deadline where i needed to either get this sorted or return all the components. It was a clear and crisp January day. I hopped on my snowmobile to just relieve some tension. I was blasting down the trail at about 80 MPH, when it hit me.
WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO UPGRADE?
because my old computer kept shutting off randomly.
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH THIS ONE?
it keeps shutting off randomly
COULD THIS BE RELATED?
:SMACKHEAD: :SMACKHEAD: :SMACKHEAD: :SMACKHEAD:
I cruised back home and put everything back together on my computer. I unplugged the case switch from the motherboard and shorted the correct jumpers manually. The computer booted up and ran flawlessly. I pulled the switch out of the case and put an ohm meter on it. When the switch was closed, it has zero resistance. When it was open it had around 3,000 ohms of resistance. Which was apparently enough to make the computer think that the switch was closed sometimes.
Moral of the story? I don’t know. Case switches don’t just go bad - that’s the first one I’ve ever seen.
Not too exciting but short and sweet: Once, while suffering from tooth pain at work, I tried to Google whether I could mix Tylenol with my Vicodin. I wasn’t thinking well and clicked on the first result which was to a .ru domain.
Had I been lucid, I would have never gone to a Russian hosted site.
As was, my work computer was instantly covered with desktop shortcuts to porn sites, online gambling, etc. I’d get pop-ups constantly, even without a browser open. Every word on a webpage was a link to some shopping site. It took a frantic two days of working with some good people on one of those “We’ll read your HijackThis logs and tell ya what to do” sites to fix the results of one poorly chosen mouse click. Thank God it was only my computer infected and not the work server.
I was at work (at a company that did extensive monitoring for porn surfing, which becomes important later in the story), researching some software that a user had asked me about. I Googled it to see if there was a Mac version available. I clicked on one of the Google results, which turned out to be a site offering cracked versions of the software. When I went to this site, it brought up a dialog box asking if I wanted to install the “Hot SEXXX Toolbar” in my browser. I of course clicked No. A box came up saying “Click Yes”, and then returned me to the previous dialog box. I had to use Task Manager to get rid of the dialog without installing the toolbar.
Morals of the story:
It’s easy to find sites that can try to install stuff that will get you into trouble, even if you’re performing a completely innocuous search. My Google search made no mention of cracked software or warez, but I found such sites anyway.
Don’t click Yes to every dialog box without reading it.
Know what to do if you run into a dialog box that won’t let you click No (hint: clicking Yes isn’t the answer).
What about stories that don’t involve hardware or software failure? I used to support a team of traveling sales reps. They demanded laptops, but most of the sales team ignored my suggestions to (a) take the laptops home when they weren’t traveling, (b) lock the laptops in a secure cabinet when they weren’t traveling, or © use a cable lock to secure the laptops when they weren’t traveling. Securing expensive hardware was way too difficult and time-consuming for a team of busy sales executives.
Sure enough, one morning I got in the office suite had a broken lock, most of the sales team had no laptops, and the landlord had a nifty video of someone leaving the suite with a duffel bag (presumably) full of stolen laptops.
Do I need to add that the same people who couldn’t be bothered to lock up their computers also couldn’t be bothered to back up their contact databases, proposals, and other important stuff. Way too difficult and time-consuming for a team of busy sales executives…
Yo dawg I herd you liked Tylenol so I put some Tylenol in your Vicodin so you could get liver failure while you get liver failure!
When our home desktop computer went tits-up (for reasons that still aren’t clear… the repair tech swore it was the hard drive but based on behavior, I think it was the motherboard; ultimately both were replaced)… we were ultimately able to get everything off the hard drive before it was taken away by the tech.
We hadn’t backed up our Quicken file off the hard drive for over a month. And we enter a LOT of transactions, that we’d have had to reconstruct. We were ultimately able to recover a much more recent copy of the file and only lost a day or three worth of data, but it could have been much worse.
We now use an external drive for that.
A colleague once did “del .” on her c:\ directory (this was in the DOS days).
In Unix, I once inadvertently piped the output of a PERL program, not to something.txt, but something.pl, by mistake. The same something.pl that was executing (now really, wouldn’t you expect the OS to say “THAT’s IN USE, FOOL!”?). Had to get that one restored, lost a couple of days worth of coding. :smack:.
Speaking of the .ru extension… a colleague once turned away from her computer to converse with someone. When she turned back, her monitor was covered in porno popups. She was horrified!
To this day, she can’t figure out what she did to cause that, as she hadn’t (to her knowledge) been visiting any dodgy websites.
Ahhh I was looking for that site some time ago and couldn’t find it. Good stuff.
I once worked in a situation where a bunch of us sat around a large table working on our laptops. There were maybe a dozen people on the project team, and space was scarce. One had to keep one’s arms pulled close to one’s body to avoid rubbing elbows with the people on either side of one.
Nerf guns were common there. People were constantly shooting Nerf bullets at each other, a practice that I hated. One day, the whole room was out to lunch except for me. One of my coworkers came in, opened a can of Coke, set it down right next to his laptop, and left. Another coworker immediately entered and decided to randomly fire a Nerf weapon in a random direction.
Lesson learned: Spilled Coke will immediately fry a laptop.
Yeah. Similarly, people will save a file named MYDATA.DOC, then during another session they start a new file and save it as MYDATA.DOC. Then they wonder what happened to their original data. They think the data will get appended to the end I guess.
I support one program that has user-created documents, and I do NOT enjoy tech support for it. People find so many ways to lose their data.
The “ILOVEYOU” worm is a famous example of why you should be careful when opening email attachments.
There are many examples of laptops being a vector for getting worms onto a network, or moving them from one network to another. Firewalls often won’t help if someone connects an infected laptop to your network. Don’t think that a firewall means you don’t have to be careful about keeping up to date with security patches and other good security practices.
If your company is doing network-wide automatic backups, and you have a laptop, your admins can’t back up the data on your laptop unless the laptop is turned on and connected to the network. Make sure you know whose responsibility it is to ensure that the data on the laptop is actually getting backed up.
I’ve got another story for you, this one from my days at UC Santa Cruz. This takes place in 2000, when rolling blackouts were common in California.
We found out, during the first rolling blackout we experienced, that the people in charge of the network equipment were not using UPS’s on their routers. That meant that, when a blackout happened, our network went down. That meant that, even if your desktop computer had a UPS, you might not be able to save your work after a blackout happened, if you had been using the network to get to where that work was actually stored. Don’t think that, just because you’ve got a UPS, you don’t need to worry about saving your work. You might find out too late that your networking equipment or something else you need to save your work isn’t on a UPS.
white house dot com
What about it? “WhiteHouse.com is a non-partisan website which focuses on giving average Americans a greater voice on issues facing the country.”
Shortest one yet…
rm * .c
I’ll take your word for it. Before it went to that, though, it was hardcore porn.