Ryan P Boyce

Nice work. Good findings as well. You also did a good job of clearly communicating where the target stood against other industries.

Port scanning may vary country to country. In the US I don’t think its illegal, nor do I think it should be. Universities get scanned constantly by IP addresses in other countries. In those cases since we can’t go the ISP in that country to tell them to stop we simply place them on the blacklist. If you are a hospital,or a company that has government contracts or anyone else that has strict business guidelines you would want to whitelist only what your want to talk to and black list the rest to protect yourself from being scanned.

This article was pretty helpful to list the process hackers may be following. It shows that even the hackers follow a routine like a real job.
I like that you targeted a company that has connections to larger companies. Companies are outsourcing multiple parts of their infrastructure to contractors that often have more access than they should. A famous example is the Target breach where the criminals got into the system through the HVAC company.

If I used the word “secure” I was incorrect. The CRC check only verifies that the packet received was the packet sent. No determination can be made as to whether or not someone made a copy.

Wade

Thanks Ryan for this very interesting article. As a user of Dropbox and other cloud storage platforms, it brings us to the realization that the data and information we put on the web is never completely safe. It reminds us that we should be careful what we upload or submit on the internet, whether it’s account sign-ups or social media posts. Once information is posted online, we are no longer the sole proprietor of that information and we entrust the third parties that elicited our information to protect it. Like mentioned in class, there is no way to guarantee 100% security in any information system. Systems are made by us and somebody with the right means and tools will discover the vulnerabilities to exploit.

Ryan,

This is a great article. Its interesting how it takes so long to crack the encryption key and that DropBox is releasing another statement to its users regarding the breach that was 4 years ago. After reading this I definitely went and changed my password on DropBox. The end of the article tells us that we should use password managers. I have personally been using a password manager for years now its called DashLane and it has significantly improved my password security.

This is an interesting article, Ryan. I don’t use Dropbox often but I do use google drive as my primary document backup. I worried about the data breach at the beginning, but it is so easy and convenience to use. So I just forgot about the risk. It is shocking that only one password can allow hackers to do this much. Firewall is not the only thing can protect us anymore. We should look beyond the risk and take care of our data at anytime since there is no perfect way to stop the data breach.

It’s an interesting article, Ryan. Even though changing password is one of the easiest and most effective way to protect our information against hacking, most people would not like to change their password often. It is because people usually don’t have enough awareness of the vulnerability of keeping using the same password. If no one remind them, they won’t remember to change by themselves. It’s even true to me. I don’t change my password often except for the TU account, since Temple reminds me to change password every half a year. Another reason is that people cannot remember their passwords if they change a lot, especially we have so many accounts for different websites with different password requirements. The article suggests us to use a password manager, but another problem will raise, what if the password manager is attacked? We can see there is no 100% safe way to protect our information from hacking. Hacking is always easier than anti-hacking.

Changing of passwords is an issue of some controversy. If you have to change regularly, people tend to come up with simpler passwords, or some kind of formula or system so they can keep track.

This is a really interesting concept to think about. I’m not sure if these distant civilizations intentionally sent out these radio frequencies. Maybe they are simply radio stations in that distant world. But, i suppose if the frequencies are all multiples of 187.5, that would not be the case. In that case, I think anything is possible. I think if this civilization was intentionally sending out radio signals in search for other signs of life, there would definitely have to be project managers and analysts or similar positions.

This was a great refresher Ryan. Currently I would definitely agree many of our group projects are still in the design phase. The design phase is so important to our projects, you need to make sure you are addressing all of your requirements, and really delivering a product that is a solution to your defined problem. Within the next week I think groups will begin to transfer away from designing and begin to focus on the delivery of the presentation. The implementation, like you said would be the presentation, is a very important part in the project. If you can’t pitch your solution properly you will essential fail, even if you have an amazing idea. You need to build your presentation keeping this in mind if you want to succeed.

I definitely agree with you Ryan, it takes experience to become a great integrative thinker. Like we talked about in class all of us will soon be entering into the workforce, and be taking on entry level IT jobs. In our entry-level jobs I believe that we will be exposed little by little to exactly how to use integrative thinking. Once we move into our second career or get a promotion we will soon begin to adopt the skill and utilize it. It could take several years to master this skill, but it is truly a very valuable skill to have.

I firmly agree with you. We should adopt integrative thinking skills because it’s a competitive world. Whenever we will enter in the IT industries we need to think and do work differently. It is only possible if we will adopt integrative thinking skill in our own.