I guess it is good to have a job when I got back.

morning all. came in to a rush job so check in had to wait.

So Brent and Richard, what have you heard about the new Wi-Fi hack?

I don't go around connecting to other people's Wi-Fi so I don't see it as a big worry for me. Anything to be concerned about?

Whew. It is 2:30pm here. Just got back from my 30 minute 8:30am IT Department meeting. And I didn't even get lunch!

Had to go talk to several different groups about some current and upcoming projects. All could have easily been done via email in a paragraph each, two at the most. At worse a 10 or 15 minute phone call. AND None of the meetings solved one single problem or updated one single issue. Complete waste of time that did nothing but put off actually doing anything. Grrrrrr.

Talked to current IT Director about several issues. Only answer I got was we need to have a meeting about that. Telling me we needed to have a meeting about it took as long or longer than actually talking about it and resolving the issue. Arrrgh.

We have complex discussions about our company in a few lines of text. Sometime a little longer email is needed. We even chat on occasion. ;)

you need to cut down on communication its killing productivity.

Company has gotten too many managers and gotten meeting happy and deferring decisions.
Decisions are being left to the President whom was the CFO and is basing decisions on pure dollars and not our industry and customers.

Which of the new hacks? We talked about so many at the conference that my mind started to go numb. Mostly though, don't ever use a wi-fi that isn't password protected for anything important because they send all the packets in clear text while the password protected ones send the packets encrypted. You can still get hacked, but it is much harder. If you use a VPN to connect to work then the VPN is usually well encrypted and you can use those on unprotected wi-fi. Also, don't use the option to automatically connect. The hacker will send a packet (deauthenticate) to get your equipment to disconnect from the real wi-fi and if the hacker has a stronger signal you will connect to that one automatically and they become man in the middle and can route you to wherever they like on the way to your destination.

Richard, we had the opposite problem for a while here. He would base his decisions based on the shortest skirt. That is how we ended up with a very expensive POS phone system that we had to have two spare analog gateways for because they broke before they could get the replacement spare to us. Having the second spare gave us a replacement for the spare that would undoubtedly break. We did not finish that contract. What was frustrating is that he never asked anyone's opinion after the meetings with the sales people from the different companies.

I aint the brightest bulb in the litter but I know when to grab a new bat on 4th down.

Think Glen is referring to the new wifi hack called KRACK. They can get into your wifi while a device is negotiating authentication and then sniff all the traffic. It is not the middle man scenario, it is pure hacking into the WPA encryption connect negotiations.

So far the only real protection I've heard is to access the internet thru a paid VPN so they can't sniff the VPN encrypted WLAN to intenet traffic. Basically all your home LAN traffic is encrypted to a VPN server then it goes out to the net from there. If you set the same VPN up on your phone it would do the same thing no matter who your phone service is with. All the phone's data traffic would go thru the VPN wifi or cell.

Been thinking about doing a VPN because the VPN services let you pick where you are from. So on F1 weekends I can be from England and watch F2 on Skysports Live. It also keeps your service provider or anybody else from being able to tell what your are doing on the net, ie privacy. The thing that has stopped me before now is I will have to get a new router because my Apple don't do VPN.

For KRACK they also say to keep your wifi router/devices updated (but is recommended hoping they patch the hack)

Yeah, WPA/WPA2 were stop gap measures to provide a little security as opposed to WEP. WPA2 Enterprise is a little more secure but everything is compromised. Go grab a Pi or Pineapple and you have an inexpensive way to grab all kinds of data if you want it.

VPN is a good service if you trust them, or better yet, make your own.

Not sure how I would set up my own VPN? Can setup a VPN to access my network from outside my network, but not to access the internets from my network.

Looks like someone won the lottery on serial numbers...

https://thechive.files.wordpress.com...rip=info&w=300

Urinal with serial number: 4U2PN2

Yea, no way was that serial number a random one. Some employee at American Standard was laughing his butt off when he made that.

Mertnin

Let the Pepper out to take care of her morning business and sure feels like Fall out there.

Maybe that is because it is fall. ;)

Our male dachshund has been full mouse alert for the pond area in the back yard. When he is out there in cold weather, it is a real mouse alert. I set three traps on the open ground out there Tuesday night. I got two of them. I set three more last night. I came up empty. Either they learned real quick, or they moved on. I will try again tonight.
We have to lock the side gate to keep the dogs out of that part of the back yard when the traps are out. I don't need to catch a dog's nose.

Arstechninca had a pretty good article on it.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/how-to-build-your-own-vpn-if-youre-rightfully-wary-of-commercial-options/

We use the Tomcat brand in the house and bait them with peanut butter. They work well but when the dogs are in the beagle seems to squeeze into where the traps are and comes running out with a trap attached to his lip.

Only my iPhone (and my wife's iPhone and iPad) use wi-fi for internet access. Everything else is Cat 5a or Cat 6

She does not use wi-fi away from the house. Well except at her mom's house.

The VPN solution fixes more than the wi-fi hacks if you are concerned about any proprietary information going to clients or any other privacy issue really.

morning all. is it nap time yet? I just can't seem to get enough sleep. Got a tad sick in NC and now I'm just dragging along. I think even snails pass me.