Taking Risks
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We all take risks in our jobs, though most of us try to mitigate the impact of those risks. It seems that the more many of us continue to work in IT, the less likely we are to perform action that might put our systems or networks at risk for some virus or other infection.
Most of the people I know in IT work remotely some percentage of the time. It's usually an ad hoc, on-call type of work rather than telecommuting on a regular basis, but all of them have the need to work outside of the office. And they do it at hot spots or other mobile locations at times. Maybe I'm naive, but I think for the most part that these locations on and of themselves don't pose a risk to their companies.
Instead I think it's more the behavior of people that do things without thinking. I saw this article (Mobile I.T. Workers Taking Risks Online) and it makes perfect sense. I've definitely seen people that don't think security, and they're often not the IT folks, when clicking on jokes, IMs, etc. that are sent to them.
I'd like to think that lots of IT people, especially admins, are careful about what they do on their machines. I know many people have gotten used to using the "Run as" command and a privileged account for doing certain things on their machines or networks. And hopefully most people realize that downloading music and other non-work related materials, is something that they should do on a personal machine.
I'm sure people take chances. I know I had a friend asking me about some error on their computer last week that was actually a "fake error box" popped in a small browser by some web site. Thankfully I caught it in time and showed them how to "close" those boxes without clicking OK or Cancel.
In many ways the Internet is an amazing place that empowers, excites, and entertain us. But it can also be a very dangerous place and it pays to be prudent with your actions, especially when you are using your employer's assets.
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I took a risk on my laptop and got burned. I was among the legion running as admin, which is a mistake in and of itself. But the big mistake was reading headlines on Slashdot one morning and seeing a story on a RealVNC exploit that would allow a bad guy to take control of your computer across the internet. I checked and I indeed had the broken version installed, but I didn't think it applied to me because the only thing that I used it for was to control my desktop from my laptop when I was lying in my chair in the living room.
Big mistake.
It was kind of interesting watching my laptop get compromised. I was at work at the university banging on my laptop. I paused, and my cursor started drifting to the right. Unusual, but not unheard of as I had an IBM ThinkPad with the eraser mouse. So I continue working. Later I went to nuke my lunch, came back, and my laptop had rebooted! Again, unusual, but not unheard of for Windows to spontaneously blow up and reboot. I thought nothing of it and logged on. A couple of minutes later I went back to the break room to get my lunch. Come back and the Add/Remove dialog was open and the hacker was scrolling down to my firewall and trying to remove it!
I yanked out the wireless PCCard and that pretty much put an end to that. The only damage was that he'd uninstalled my anti-virus, that's what had required the reboot. I had then obligingly logged on again and he was able to continue his work.
I immediately uninstalled VNC (I wasn't using it that much) and created user-level accounts.
Still, an interesting experience that could have turned out much worse.
I'm very careful with my internet access and have never had a virus or worm on any of my PC systems. I need to toughen up my new MacBook Pro but first I need to learn how to do that! I've downloaded the NSA's hardening guide to OS-X, I just have to find some time to study and implement it.
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[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
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