Anonymous

It's easy to remember those users who call the help desk all the time complaining about silly things that turn out to be either nothing or problems of their own making. But what happens when someone from the IT lines makes a huge mistake? That person becomes a legend -- and the error can unearth other problems.

This story happened while I was working at a large, non-U.S. government organization. An IT guy, let's call him "Robert," was asked to decommission servers in the main data center that were offline without a label and no longer used. The idea was to clear up space, gain a more precise idea of all the hardware present in the building, and determine what team was using it and for what. If there was any doubt about a piece of equipment, Robert was to first figure out who was in charge of it, then wait until they gave the all-clear before proceeding.

I work as a freelance technician for a relatively large company. I troubleshoot and fix printers, computer parts, and so on. On the whole, the job is uneventful, but there are notable exceptions, such as these two experiences that deliver high doses of the "ick factor."

A pesky printer problem
One day, I got called to a food factory of some kind to do printer maintenance. I needed to replace a printer toner and drum roll, as well as take a look at a few odds and ends (roller engine, printed circuit board) -- pretty straightforward.

Years ago, I had recently graduated from college and was working at two part-time gigs. My morning job was at a small financial company as the sole IT guy.

This small financial company was a child company of a much larger and more famous parent company based in New York. We were allowed to use whatever software we wished, with a few exceptions dictated by the parent company. One of these exceptions was our email software: We were ordered to use a relatively obscure email software made by a famous company with a three-letter acronym.

As the senior programmer and network admin for a large mortuary (yes, mortuary), it was my duty to discover why our Internet connection to the outside world went down one day -- and to get it fixed quickly.

This was back in the days before point-to-point T1 lines were even close to being within our IT budget, and so the Internet over 56K modems was the most affordable method for our remote locations to communicate with the main branch.

First, people who are desperate are more willing than ever to “bite” on the lure of convincing scams because of they are under increasing financial stress and pressure. Second, the number of scams and people perpetrating those scams increases during difficult financial times. Third, according to a recent survey by Nationwide Insurance, over half of respondents don’t know if they have enough money to weather fraud.

http://information-security-resources.com/2009/08/10/a-guide-to-identity-theft-and-the-recession/

My first job right out of college was with a small software company that developed systems for medical offices. The company covered every aspect from start to finish, which included developing the network/hardware equipment and software, installation, and support.

Being a small company, the sale of a system was a big thing. In our town, word of mouth helped create sales, which helped us make payroll, so keeping customers happy was very important.

Anyone in the security field will tell you that information security is affected and addressed at multiple layers within a solution. As part of the evaluation process for an enterprise business solution, particularly one that enables the transport of potentially sensitive data outside the corporate network, a risk analysis should be conducted. READ MORE

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced today the release of a DHS-developed detection tool that can be used by the federal government, commercial vendors, state and local governments, and critical infrastructure owners and operators to scan their networks for the Conficker/Downadup computer worm.

Patch Links Here:

A computer admin at the school I attended bought a new proxy server to stop our file sharing. It was supposed to block "bad" Web sites in addition to filtering out some of the ports that P2P programs use. Trouble was, all we had to do was use a service such as Proxify to get around it.

The whole student Internet service was set up poorly. It was on the same connection as the school's computers in the labs, so anytime students started to browse heavily in the dorms or on the campus wireless, all the computers suffered massive slowdown in bandwidth.