Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Voyeurism and IT

Okay, people, let's think about this:

1. Electronics and water generally don't mix. High levels of humidity are NOT good for most computers.

2. I'm not sure which is more impressive: the guy's initiative, or his victim's gullibility quotient.

3. If you are that desperate to see pictures of nude women, it's not like there aren't a lot of those pics available for free on the internet these days (uh, I mean, that's what I've heard).

4. Biola, in case you've never heard of it, is the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, which bills itself as an evangelical Christian school.

And these disparate threads come together in this article.

6 comments:

gena said...

Eww, eww, ewwww! What a creep. That said, seriously? "Take your computer into the bathroom when you shower?" How dumb ARE people? Wait, don't answer that....

Cthulhu Sashimi said...

"So THAT'S where I'm supposed to insert this USB connection...?"

Moose said...

The gullibility of you humans never ceases to amaze me. Like the ones who fall for the random "mobile breast exams" that knock on their doors. Sheesh.

Officer Cynical said...

I just run my laptop through the gentle cycle, then dry on low heat, once a week. It has eliminated annoying spam e-mails completely.

Anonymous said...

Saw this earlier in the week. I shared it with all my Mac-loving people at work. They claim Macs are somehow, mystically immune to viruses and all the other malware. HAH!
This guy gets a 5 (of 10) in style points, but an 8 in originality. The Soviet judge was overrulled.
And Dr. G - yes, there are pix of women (and men) unclothed doing strange things out there on the interwebs, but I have no first, er, hand experience of that either.

Don said...

From the viewpoint of a networking professional, the genius?? of his method was the social engineering part of his "system error" message.

Computers are black boxes to many people. They don't know or care how they work. Just that they do work. Kind of like their automobiles. They have gotten used to all sorts of error messages. Most of the messages could be written in Greek for as much good as they do the average user.

His error message was weird. But to the users, it wasn't any weirder than any other message they see. At least this one had a "tip" on how they could "fix" it themselves.

He didn't tell anyone to take the laptop into the bathroom when they were showering. If he had said that, the users would have been suspicious. He suggested a steamy environment. The users had a puzzle to solve. Where can I find a steamy environment in my home? When would it be most convenient for met to do this? The users most likely felt proud of themselves for coming up with the elegant solution of taking it in the bathroom with them.

It was an evil (perverted) genius who came up with this plan. But I can sure see why it worked for so long.

These kinds of social engineering attacks on my network are the things that keep me up at night. There is little I can do to prevent them except educate my users. It only takes one though.

 
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