Meth and ID Theft

I ran into this link over on Sunbelt Blog. It's a story about Meth addicts using ID Theft to fund their addictions.

The article, appearing in USA Today, offers some eye opening insight as to how this section of the criminal underground operates.

A lot of the initial information gathering by the group was done through dumpster diving and picking through trash (until the group went global) at companies that should know better.

Be diligent when it comes to destroying papers containing your sensative data. Buy yourself a paper shredder, for starters.

What do you do when companies with your data are lax in their procedures?

Staying familiar with your account and credit card transactions will help you notice anything out of the ordinary.

Regular Tools to Make Your Security Life Easier - II

I ran across VirusTotal.com today. VirusTotal offers the scanning of any file uploaded to their website and does so through the use of multiple A/V products. The site does come with a caveat:

Although the detection rate afforded by the use of multiple antivirus engines is far superior to that offered by just one product, these results DO NOT guarantee the harmlessness of a file.

That should be obvious to anyone in information security, but it's a good reminder nevertheless. This page has a list of the A/V products used to scan the files.

Regular Tools to Make Your Security Life Easier

Today, I ran into a couple of problems switching back and forth between computers. Changing back and forth between keyboards and mice was getting to be a pain.

A coworker pointed me to the following tools:

Synergy was the answer to my problems. Synergy allows you to use two separate monitors attached to two separate machines and share a keyboard, mouse, and clipboard between the two.

In my case, I was switching back and forth between my Windows XP desktop and my PowerBook G4 laptop. Synergy installs on both machines (including Linux).

I chose to run the server on my Windows machine and the client on my OS X laptop. Configuration is self explanatory and can be easily adjusted from the sample .conf file.

Obviously, this would work best if you could actually see both monitors at the same time like a traditional dual monitor setup.

The second application was GeekTool.

GeekTool is a PrefPane (System Preferences module) for Panther or Jaguar to show system logs, unix commands output, or images (i.e. from the internet) on your desktop (or even in front of all windows).

A screenshot of GeekTool in action can be seen here.