DigiCert recently was forced to invalidate something like 50,000 of their DNS-challenge based certs because of a bug in their system, and they gave companies like mine only 24 hours to renew them before invalidating the old ones…

My employer had an EV cert for years on our primary domain. The C-suites, etc. thought it was important. Then one of our engineers who focuses on SEO demonstrated how the EV cert slowed down page loads enough that search engines like Google might take notice. Apparently EV certs trigger an additional lookup by the browser to confirm the extended validity.

Once the powers-that-be understood that the EV cert wasn’t offering any additional usefulness, and might be impacting our SEO performance (however small) they had us get rid of it and use a good old OV cert instead.

Back in the 90’s before the days of Windows 3.0 I had to debug a memory manager written by a brilliant but somewhat odd guy. Among other thing I stumbled across:

• A temporary variable called “handy” because it was useful in a number of situations.
• Another one called son_of_handy, used in conjunction with handy.
• Blocks of memory were referred to as cookies.
• Cookies had a flag called removed_cookie_corrupt that would get set if the block of memory was suspected of being corrupt.
• Each time a cookie was found to be corrupt then the function Ohremoved() was called.
• If too many cookies were corrupt then the function OhremovedOhremovedOhremoved() was called, which would terminate everything.

If you have ssh open to the world then it’s better to disable root logins entirely and also disable passwords, relying on ssh keys instead.

Port 22 is the default SSH port and it receives a TON of malicious traffic any time it’s open to the whole internet. 20 years ago I saw a newly installed server with a weak root password get infected by an IP address in China less than an hour after being connected to the open internet.

With all the bots out there these days it would probably take a lot less time if we ran the same experiment again.

Well OPSEC is the stated cause. Who knows how the person was initially identified and tracked. For all we know he was quickly identified through some sort of Tor backdoor that the feds have figured out, but they used that to watch for an unrelated OPSEC mistake they could take advantage of. That way the Tor backdoor remains protected.

Exactly. Tor was originally created so that people in repressive countries could access otherwise blocked content in a way it couldn’t be easily traced back to them.

It wasn’t designed to protect the illegal activities of people in first world countries that have teams of computer forensics experts at dozens of law enforcement agencies that have demonstrated experience in tracking down users of services like Tor, bitcoin, etc.

Back in the late 90’s I worked for an internet search company, long before Google was a thing. We would regularly physically drive a dozen SCSI drives from a RAID array between two datacenters about 20 miles apart.

Not easily. The scammer likely has your current address & contact info, but knows nothing about your history.

To confirm your identity when you contact these reporting agencies they will use details from your credit history by asking detailed questions the scammer likely won’t know. For example it might be questions like these:

• What kind of car did you purchase in 2005?

1. Honda
2. Ford
3. Saab
4. Jeep
5. None of the above

• Which one of these companies did you work for previously?

1. IBM
2. Pizza Hut
3. Macy’s
4. Jiffy Lube
5. None of the above

They’ll throw 3 or 4 questions like these at you that you’ll have to answer correctly. They might involve places you used to live, banks you have had accounts with, etc. The chances of a scammer with your SSN knowing all these details about you is pretty tiny.

The credit monitoring companies have your up-to-date contact information (and verified) when you put the freeze in place. Now, should a third party try to open an account, etc. in your name it should be blocked from happening and the credit monitoring company should contact you.

If a scammer tries to unfreeze or otherwise modify your account with them they should also contact you.

If/when they contact you or you request your account be unfrozen then they’ll use old credit history to confirm your identity. These are a series of three or four random questions that a scammer is unlikely to know. For example they might ask you what kind of car you purchased in 2005, then give you 4 options, like Ford, Honda, Jaguar, or BMW, and then also a “nine of the above” option. Then they might ask you which of the following street addresses you used to live at, and list 4 seemingly random addresses, one of which you might have lived at.

It’s been roughly 20 years now but my employer at the time had a number of servers that started having odd drive failures at similar times. Long story short we eventually discovered that it was the power supplies that were starting to fail.

These servers had something like 6 hard drives in them, and while troubleshooting we started seeing a pattern where any 5 would work, but as soon as the 6th was reconnected then drives would randomly fail. We eventually replaced the power supply and all 6 drives were happy again.

So you have to completely reinstall Windows if you want to get rid of the GUI on an existing system?

On Linux just edit a file & reboot…