ITACS 5211: Introduction to Ethical Hacking
Wade Mackay
Since we were on the subject of social engineering of last weeks class. I thought this was an interesting article dealing with the university that we all attend. This is a case of a student using her Target gift card to get pass security. The student acted like she belonged and she was able to not get security to really look to see if she had an ID, which is needed to get in most of the buildings on campus.
Hello class- while looking for something to write about I came across this article and thought I should share with you.
The New York Times has a Tech Tip section, and this week’s part by J.D. Biersdorfer walks us through the opportunities and challenges of creating apps for different technologies, even if you’ve never studied computer programming. It also provides interesting links to explore materials and tutorials for online exercises on your own pace and time.
Under the Computer Science Education Week link https://csedweek.org/, you can try to code for an hour and expand your horizon with this cool site, watch the 5-minute video and get your 5 minutes of coolness’ for the day.
There are other links available for Apple’s free software, videos and tutorials for learning the Swift language, I was also interested in the coding concepts link and the free Swift Playground app for the iPad platform, but why are you still reading this, click on the link and have fun.
492 ATMs across Europe were blown up by thieves in the first half of 2016, as criminals looked to supplement their attempts at infiltrating machines via cyber-attacks. These “cash out” or “jackpotting” attacks typically involve malware which takes control of the ATM’s cash dispensing function to fill the pockets of the cyber criminals. ATM fraud alone cost European lenders €174m (£157m) in the first half of 2016, up from €156m (£141m) a year ago. This new shows criminal gangs increasingly using diverse tactics, and blending physical and online methods, to steal from banks. A report from Kaspersky Lab back in April claimed that almost all ATMs across the globe can be illegally accessed and raided without even the need to install malware – because they’re running outdated technology.
Link: http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/euro-bank-robbers-blow-up-492-atms/
The DDoS attack on 10/21/16 that took down Dyn wreaked havoc throughout the internet. Many websites like Spotify, Twitter, Paypal and many other sites were down for a significant amount of time. This goes to show that taking down a major DNS supplier can essentially take down a big portion of the internet. If hackers can do this at their own will how can we know for certain that this won’t happen again in the future even worse.
Article: http://gizmodo.com/todays-brutal-ddos-attack-is-the-beginning-of-a-bleak-f-1788071976