Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

What's your number, Kevin Mitnick?

Filed under
Security

Doing this, he said, would allow employees to verify a caller was who they said they were by calling them back at the provided number. In the case of someone looking to snaffle company details over the phone, it would scare them off immediately. If the caller was legitimate, they would be happy to comply with the request.

"If people would just call people back," Mitnick told attendees at a forum hosted by vendor Citrix this morning in Sydney, "it would eliminate 80 percent of the threat".

Mitnick described how the Motorola employee who delivered him secret company source code back in his hacking days gave him a nervous moment when the call was almost lost as she put him on hold to check some details with her security manager. Ultimately, however, that attempt succeeded.

While most people naturally wanted to help others who contacted them, he said, employees needed to be taught to deny requests that could compromise security.

The reformed hacker -- currently a security consultant -- pointed out those attempting to breach company security relied upon the intelligence-gathering they did in the lead-up to an attack. One fantastic target for such information, he said, was the company's IT helpdesk.

"They're there to help," he enthused, pointing out fraudsters calling a help desk number would be able to find out what verification tokens -- such as date of birth or employee ID number -- help desk staff used to verify a caller's identity. They could then go away, do some research and come back armed and ready to breach a user's account.

While Mitnick's social engineering tips are ultimately timeless and technology-neutral, the ex-hacker is obviously keeping up with today's tech gadgets.

He pointed out one of Apple's AirPort devices (a popular wireless hub) could instantly create a wireless access port into any company's headquarters if plugged into a company network port.

"You could just put a company logo on it, with a label saying 'IT Department, do not remove'," he said. "You could be browsing the network from the parking lot."

A USB bluetooth device would fulfil the same function if plugged into the back of an employee's PC, he said.

By Renai LeMay
ZDNet Australia

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.