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Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers

My Next book is Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers Kindle Edition which is also linked within our resources page on EMHS.

While I just baught the book, I was reading the sample of the book and its quite interesting to learn that Sandworm was actually developed and used well before we covered it in the tech press.

I say we loosely, because I’m not a full journalist, although I do write about what interests me and what I think about what I read.

From Amazon’s page

“With the nuance of a reporter and the pace of a thriller writer, Andy Greenberg gives us a glimpse of the cyberwars of the future while at the same time
placing his story in the long arc of Russian and Ukrainian history.” —Anne Applebaum, bestselling author of Twilight of Democracy
The true story of the most devastating act of cyberwarfare in history and the desperate hunt to identify and track the elite Russian agents behind it: “[A]
chilling account of a Kremlin-led cyberattack, a new front in global conflict” (Financial Times).
In 2014, the world witnessed the start of a mysterious series of cyberattacks. Targeting American utility companies, NATO, and electric grids in Eastern
Europe, the strikes grew ever more brazen. They culminated in the summer of 2017, when the malware known as NotPetya was unleashed, penetrating, disrupting,
and paralyzing some of the world’s largest businesses—from drug manufacturers to software developers to shipping companies. At the attack’s epicenter in
Ukraine, ATMs froze. The railway and postal systems shut down. Hospitals went dark. NotPetya spread around the world, inflicting an unprecedented ten billion
dollars in damage—the largest, most destructive cyberattack the world had ever seen.
The hackers behind these attacks are quickly gaining a reputation as the most dangerous team of cyberwarriors in history: a group known as Sandworm. Working
in the service of Russia’s military intelligence agency, they represent a persistent, highly skilled force, one whose talents are matched by their willingness
to launch broad, unrestrained attacks on the most critical infrastructure of their adversaries. They target government and private sector, military and
civilians alike.
A chilling, globe-spanning detective story, Sandworm considers the danger this force poses to our national security and stability. As the Kremlin’s role
in foreign government manipulation comes into greater focus, Sandworm exposes the realities not just of Russia’s global digital offensive, but of an era
where warfare ceases to be waged on the battlefield. It reveals how the lines between digital and physical conflict, between wartime and peacetime, have
begun to blur—with world-shaking implications.

It is 370 print pages.

It is written in English.

This is a 2019 book published by Anchor.

It is also available in paper format which is the link on EMHS’s page.

Feel free to check out the book, and make it a great day! This is going to get very interesting. I can’t wait to read more.

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Merry Christmas from the Jared Rimer Network

Hello folks,

Christmas has come and gone. Please feel free to contact the network and let us know what you got for Christmas.

Got a tech gadget? Make sure you protect it from hackers and crackers who love when things are not secured.

Sites like komando.com and others we may not list may have tips for you.

While we take one more week off from TSB, our goal will be to get the show notes together as well as listening to other newsy podcasts and other things we need to keep up on.

I hope that this week will be of joy as we turn the page on a new year next week. May it warm up and people can enjoy whatever they got as some tech may work better outside than in.

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What has been posted as of December 13, 2022 to EMHS

EMHS stands for email host security, the project that is hoping to shed light on the big time phishing problem that we have seen more of lately in recent years. Here’s the web site.

Here is what has been posted within the last week to the site.

Blog Posts

Here are the recent blog posts that we have posted there. Note that there is one we added this week from October that we added when going through a more recent article. I explain this in a recent blog post.

New Books

We have one new book which was added to the list after a review of it. We heard about the book through the Cyber Crime Magazine podcast at Cyber Crime Radio.

  • Robert Kerbeck

Fixes to company entries

We have fixed a couple of things in the company section of the site. There are no new entries. One was some additional information and one was a spelling mistake.

Companies and services of interest
Phish Labs by Help Systems Phishlabs was started after a security engineer turned product engineer found that he could take Phishing sites down, but they came back up shortly after. Phishlabs runs a blog that talks about the landscape as well as protecting large companies and their brands from impersonation attacks as well as other attacks they might face. They may reach out to other companies if they detect something that needs taken down. The heading on the home page says it all. It says: “Digital Risk Protection through curated threat intelligence and complete mitigation.” They are now part of Fortra. More info on Fortra on their web site.
Virus Total Virus Total is a service where you can send files and URL’s for analysis. The site will return any negative results, telling you what might be a problem so you can be informed what you receive. For best results if using screen readers, the JRN recommends you use Chrome.

Terms

There are no new terms this week. Please visit our site for the entire list. During our break, I hope to get this list in to alphabetical order and Know Be4’s link separate from that list as it links to an updated glossary that has continually been updated.

TSB’s page will be updated when the podcast goes up with the next date being the first week in January. We want you to be reminded that as we’re posting this, we’re doing the last show of the year. The JRN will be taking the rest of the year off, and any other podcasts like webinars of interest will go under the technology blog and podcast category.

Find all of our resources and why the site was braught back at email host security and I hope that this finds you well!

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The Cyberwire is reporting Uber having another breach

The Cyberwire is reporting that Uber has had yet another breach. According to what I heard today on yesterday’s program, it may be internal code and stuff, but Uber says it isn’t theirs according to the segment I’ve heard. Apparently Cyberscoop amongst other publications has this, but I’ve not been through RSS and won’t be going through RSS till later on today at best.

I’ll be definitely looking for this one, and when I do, I’ll post it to the list and get it blogged.

This post will be going under general commentary for now, and we’ll see what happens.

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This is very funny, the geek squad sending me an email of a charge that doesn’t exist?

Hello folks,

As I woke up today, I checked mail on my phone. I spotted a very interesting emaoil coming from a gmail account saying that The Geek Squad charged me an anual charge of $425.87.

That’s funny, because I never signed up for the geek squad. Here’s the email, minus the email address.

Can anyone spot what’s wrong with this email?

Hello dear –

This is to inform you that your following administrations has been consequently recharged according to your solicitation.

Auto Renewal Summary :-

Payment Source : Updated Nominated Payment mode
Username :

Receipt id : OI-65426178M
Amount Charged : $425.87
Total Final Cost : $425.87

Title : Geek Squad@ High level Network and Device Protection Span: 1 Year

The subscription amount of $425.87 processed successfully from the updated account funds.

This help expense will be auto charge consistently unless we get verbal consent to void/drop the charges.

If there should be an occurrence of additional explanation or to absolutely get a full discount generously contact us # {+1}-888-316-7915

Kind Regards

Alex Smith

[Geek Squad@ Service Team]

#Thank you for using Geek Squad services#

The subject line is: Order confirmation:5901847xxxx

Very convincing right? Would anyone call this number claiming that they were wrongly charged? If so, what do you think would happen?

Let’s see who is right.

Comments (0)

My first day on IOS 15.x

Hello everyone,

Well, today is going to be my first fullday on IOS 15.x.

I got it installed last night, between 8 and 9 PM.

The good news is that I have not yet experienced the IOS 15.0 bugs although I did see that I couldn’t edit an alarm but it isn’t that big of a deal.

One of the biggest things that I like are the focuses. I finally can change my schedule for do not disturb which I did today. It is still new to do,

The thing I don’t like is the vibration when voiceover has nothing to read, but turing that off in touch, vibration under the accessibility makes your phone not vibrate for other things, so its a double edge sword.

I think this will be a work in process, but I do like the idea of focuses and will see if I want to set up others, although it is a set schedule from what I can gather.

I also like the alerts per app or people aspect of this too, its well thought out.

Anything you want to talk about? Sound off!

Comments (0)

What books to read, what did you find?

Well folks, this year’s NCSAM was quite different, and there may be articles that interest me that I’ve not yet read.

For those who may want to read, there are plenty of books of phishing, scams, and other topics on how to protect yourself. You can search the blog for NCSAM posts, and I’ve blogged about several different books on different topics.

Scott Schober has two great books which you can look up. I’ve also blogged about other books that I’ve read too.

The blog is open to allow you to post your recommendations on what books you’ve read.

Fraud!: how to protect yourself from schemes, scams, and swindles DB50194
Bertrand, Marsha. Reading time: 8 hours, 34 minutes.
Read by Gregory Gorton. A production of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress.
True Crime
Examines economic fraud, a billion-dollar business that victimizes more people than violent crime. Describes Ponzi and pyramid schemes, affinity fraud,
and scams involving high-tech, stocks, commodities, and franchises. Discusses con artists’ techniques, how to prevent being duped, and how to react if
targeted. 2000.

Here are other links to things that may be of interest.

What did you end up reading and do you want to discuss them on a future tecch or security box podcast? I’ll be looking forward to your responses and feel free to get in touch!

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Security Updates

I really want to take this opportunity in thanking Shaun for his hard, dedicated work on the recent issues that have plagued the blog as of yet.

As users know, I had been the only one dealing with the blog and no plug ins except for a few recommended ones I found and installed based on recomendation.

Last time I had an influx of spam, I had turned off registration because that was the only thing I could find to do.

I’ve tried installing recaptcha on MENVI’s web site on its forms and was never successful.

I really like the idea of what version 3 has to offer, leaving users alone unless there is a very valid reason for it to do so. That is why I tried to implement it there, and was never successful. I read the documentation, and never got it to work.

Thank you Shaun for your dedication, and I hope to continue to have you as much as I can for what time you can give. You’re very valuable and I think the blog should see this.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day!

Comments (1)

More Spam? Do you even read web sites?

I just saw the following email sent to me through my network as a straight email. It says:

As we end another week, it looks like there isn’t much patching going on in the pandemic age. I already covered articles covering the Zoom client and their recent acquisition, and that I hope works for them.

There may be some stuff that I have not yet read, and I may come across it later on. If thats the case and I want to cover it, I’ll probably do that.

Did you see anything in the news from Trend Micro that you want to talk about? Do you want to send me audio to be played on the podcast? Use any file sharing network of your choice, and send it to me using tech at menvi.org as the address sendy and I’ll go ahead and look at it.

This Week in Security News: 7 Tips for Security Pros Patching in a Pandemic and Coinminer, DDoS Bot Attack Docker Daemon Ports

Feel free to comment writing wise or via audio and I look forward in hearing from you!

The from address is:

From: “david” <>

It was sent to my correct email address which is not published anywhere on my site.

The reason I bring this up is to remind people that Spammers can just send to a bunch of addresses looking for a hit and a response.

My goal is not to respond to this one because I am not looking for any parts to anything, and if I were, I’d be looking for United States people not china people. This is for obvious reasons, do i need to spell this out for you all?

I guess I’ll start publishing some of the stupid like this one, lets see what we get. Obvious spam, looking for responses … oh wait … by not getting a mailback they have their response.

This aught to get interesting.

Comments (0)

Internet companies aren’t so bad, there are some good people out there

The following is my experience only, and each person may have different results. In no way am I going to tell people to use one Internet company over another, but after the experiences over the past few days, I thought I’d really take a deep dive in to how things have changed.

On Thursday afternoon, I noticed mail errors and did some investigating. I published this blog post on my personal twitter and copies also went out on on the network blog and the the mix internet radio blog as those are the main blogs I run. I do have one more but didn’t think to post the issues there.

After doing some more investigating, I posted the following tweet.

Jared Rimer, Update: the outage to the sites looks like its an ATT issue, calling them for me, don’t know how this will help, but giving it a try. 4 days ago, TW Blue

Several days later, I got this tweet from ATT. I’ve never communicated by social Media, but this is the first time i’ve communicated with them in this manner. I didn’t even tweet at them although I knew the name, and they responded to my tweet two days prior.

AT&T Help, @jrimer2008 Hey there Jared! Thank you for the update. Feel free to send us a DM if you need anything regarding your AT&T account. ^AlliyaT 2 days ago, Sprinklr

I explained that on my phone call, I asked about the wifi speeds and the person who took my call on Thursday just indicated that it was normal for it to be slow. I said it was beyond slow, that I was getting like 5mbps down and 1mbps up just to give an example.

I was then asked to direct message some account details. This was quite different doing customer service, and I even gave them Post mortem, an outage across the network on April 29th which I posted that day.

The tech I had was awesome, calling to discuss what the issue was, the fact i have had it for some time and my call Thursday prompted me to ask the question to begin with.

I’ve been doing this kind of work for many years now, and I’ve seen many reports of angry customers taking to social media to trash a company for whatever the reason was. While the above tweet indicated I would call to get the network issues resolved for me if it can be duplicated, I was able to tell them I had some other concerns that were not addressed during the call.

The weekend came and I got to thinking, I’ll do the best I can until Monday when I might have to call in and have tests come to see whats really going on. A tech called me, asked some questions, and was able to dispatch a tech for Sunday. I’ve never had techs coming anywhere on Sunday and they did come.

Suffice it to say, it turned quite interesting because I thought I would wait till Monday and call later in the day to talk to someone about the issue to determine if my equipment was going bad or what.

The tech was great too. For a sunday, they showed up in the afternoon and serviced me quickly. It was very nice to get quick, prompt, and efficient service over the weekend and now I think I’m doing well.

The person said that you can reach out to any ATT account you know of and I would recommend that you be courteous with your needs so someone can assist you. I’ve seen too many demanding people on social media say “do this or else” and trash the company for bad service.

I know I’ve made mistakes through the years as we learn and grow, but I’ve never trashed companies on social media. It isn’t who I am, and it’ll never be who I am. The experience I had this weekend was quite awesome, and this is a nice change to see.

Thanks for reading this blog, and I hope that it may bring some hope in your day knowing that companies today are looking out to help you. Great job!

Comments (1)

Post mortem, an outage across the network on April 29th

Yesterday afternoon between 3:30 PM and 4 PM US Pacific time, I noticed that we were completely down. I was getting mail issues, and even troubleshooted by putting my phone on LTE to determine if there was a block or if something was going on.

After some investigating, I determined that with ATT wireless and broadband, I was not able to access the web sites at all.

I put in a ticket, and determined that one of the people at the company could access the main web site just fine, while another staff member also on ATT could not access the network.

Since I have access to a VPN thanks to this contribution blog post I connected to it and was able to send out mail and continue working.

A little after 9 PM, my phone was able to connect to the network, since it was not connected to VPN so I switched back to my network.

what can we learn?

Sadly, when calling ATT at 5 PM, the guy who assisted me said it was the provider. I couldn’t trace root because it timed completely out after the second hop leaving ATT’s network. They indicated that they were outside the network, but I doubt it. I can’t completely prove it, but working in this industry for many years, providers blame each other when there is an outage.

To make this interesting, I’ve been getting email about a potential hack and tarnished reputation. One hit one of my sites on the 28th, and one hit another on the 30th. I can learn that there is extortion attempts, and I’m not fooled. More on the tech blog about that later on today.

I did learn that all of ATT across the country was effected by this outage and everything looks to be OK now.

Effected by the outage? What was your experience? Please contact me through my tech address at tech at menvi dot org and let me know. One person indicated while I tweeted out updates that they were able to access the site they’re on just fine. Lets work together so we can fix problems like this.

Make it a great day.

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Hands Off Dice World, we don’t want you here

In an earlier blog post I talked about someone who may have been under the age of 18 posting to Dice World’s Forums asking for credit card information because they could not get their family to pay for more storage on iclud. Sorry about that bud, we can’t help you.

In a turn of events, another potential person under the age of 18 is feeling uncomfortable because they have been asked for a date, or some other thing that may make them uncomfortable.

While people may do things that make others feel uncomfortable, I’ve personally learned that if someone says no, I should not do anything. It doesn’t matter what.

Social Media in general has made this type of activity a lot easier, and I’m not saying that I’m not guilty of anything I’m talking about here either. I’m sure we’ve all done it.

Dice World has now turned in to a social media hub with forums, private messaging capability, and fun tournament play. What we need to do here is focus on the game play aspect of what Dice World is all about. If I were doing this on dice world and someone said no, I’d have to stop whatever it was I was doing.

Facebook, Twitter, Hangouts, Whats app, and other social media may be plagued with this issue. In podcasts, I’ve talked about these types of people who have targeted me on Twitter. One I didn’t even think was a girl to begin with.

My other article Scammers hitting the blind, same as my talks earlier should be talked about once again. I’m not necessarily a scammer, however I may have done things that have made people feel uncomfortable. The only way to fix this is to tell the person that you don’t like such a thing, and that person has to understand. If you, the person feeling this way wants to block, that is an option too, and I’m sure that people have done this on all of the social media platforms, including dice world.

Another article I penned talking about kids Hey Criminals! Keep your hands off our kids and their data! is another good one that could be mentioned in passing for what these actors are doing within the social media aspect of day-to-day life.

Do you have thoughts on this besides getting rid of social media? I don’t think that will ever happen, however, I think this will get worse first. Your thoughts are welcome.

Comments (0)

Conspiracy theories on the novel corona virus make me wonder

Michael in Tennessee gave me an interesting audio which may be played on a future podcast talking about the novel Corona Virus and how it supposedly started. Apparently, this video was originally posted to Face Book, then got sent around the Internet. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I believe that this particular video leaves more questions than answers.

For example, how can something like 5G have this wide an effect? My understanding is that we don’t have 5G yet. If 5G is being rolled out, it isn’t going to be so global yet, they want to test it and see how it works.

The guy in the video said that since there is such power in this network, that it is killing everyone in contact with this power. My hunch is that if that were the case, the death toll would be higher than the 5 percent we’re currently looking at.

According to Michael in Tennessee, my point of contact for this, 5G has not really been tested widely, and it is not well-known. According to what he told me over the telephone, Twit’s main guy, Leo, said that not much is known, and we must be practically on top of a tower to have any effect from what we understand.

If you can find the vdeo, listen to it yourself. Determine what you think of it. I’m curious on what other people think of this, I think its completely off base.

Comments (0)

More Scams? Selling accounts that don’t even belong to you?

I’ve been getting the following types of contact forms as of late. All have a different name, probably some bogus phone number, but yet, have the same contact information including skype and the like.

Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by

() on Tuesday, March 03, 2020 at 12:10:36

Name: Andrewalano
phone: 82627424561
contact_method: both E-mail and phone
bug: no
additional_bug_info: Premium Aged Twitters 2007-2013

  • all come with the original email, means they’re as good as your own, will last a long time!
  • long 1 week replacement policy
  • responsive after-sales support

Prices:
2007 – $20
2008 – $15
2009 – $10
2010 – $8
2011 – $7
2012 – $6
2013 – $5
MAJOR bulk discounts when ordering 10+ accounts! deal here]

Where you can contact me,PM me here!

https://sellaccs.net

Skype & Telegram : congmmo
ICQ : @652720497
Email : congmmo@gmail . com

Payments Accepted:
BTC,ETH,ETC,LTC or Payoneer or Paypal
Paypal fees will be paid by the buyer
No refunds allowed, if you’re having issues with an account you’ve bought I will gladly replace within the first hour of purchase!
Thank you!
comment_or_question: Premium Aged Twitters 2007-2013

  • all come with the original email, means they’re as good as your own, will last a long time!
  • long 1 week replacement policy
  • responsive after-sales support

Prices:
2007 – $20
2008 – $15
2009 – $10
2010 – $8
2011 – $7
2012 – $6
2013 – $5
MAJOR bulk discounts when ordering 10+ accounts! deal here]

Where you can contact me,PM me here!

https://sellaccs.net

Skype & Telegram : congmmo
ICQ : @652720497
Email : congmmo@gmail . com

Payments Accepted:
BTC,ETH,ETC,LTC or Payoneer or Paypal
Paypal fees will be paid by the buyer
No refunds allowed, if you’re having issues with an account you’ve bought I will gladly replace within the first hour of purchase!
Thank you!

submit: Submit comment or question to the Jared Rimer Network

HTTP_USER_AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.170 Safari/537.36 OPR/53.0.2907.99
REMOTE_ADDR: 42.118.218.7

I don’t buy people’s accounts. I have my own accounts, I don’t need any other accounts. I’m sure the email addresses are invalid, and I don’t even know who these people are.

One of the reasons I killed MENVI’s contact forms was all of the spam. jaredrimer.net can’t quite do that because I don’t make any email address public. I’m happy that I know I don’t need any other accounts, and this is the way people fill out forms now.

I wish I had some sort of captcha, but I have never been able to get it to work at all. I tried recaptcha version 3 and I’m not understanding it. I’m not implementing version 2 because of the distortion of the audio, and I have no idea what else to do besides killing the form(s) across the network.

This is sad. Really sad.

Comments (0)

What happened to respectible playing on games?

Hello,

I really didn’t want to post this kind of post, but I want this to be a thought peace, not bashing on any type of platform.

Recently, on Dice World, someone posted in the newly created forums that have been around for awhile now. They were asking why they could not participate in the tournaments and the people running it said they would look in to it.

Several days later, they said that they haven’t heard anything and posted again. My hunch was that they were cheating somehow, but yet, I do not know how since nothing was discussed. They went so far as to ask how to cheat in several other games. I finally responded saying that if they were cheating, chances were that they were banned for that. The developers of the software ended up confirming what I had suspected all along. I also posted that if they were cheating and asked for cheating in the other games that they should be banned from the forums and even the entire game!

No matter whether it is Dice World, some other poker game or any type of community, cheating should not be around, and those caught should be punished.

If there are laws to protect citizens from getting hurt and abused, there should be rules in place for the cheaters like this one player. The developers are now wondering if they should have moderators.

I’ve moderated email lists through the years and have been respected for the great job I have done. I won’t tolerate the types of crap that I’ve had to report to the developers whether through the messaging system or the email messages off system, and I know that whoever the developers choose, they will have guidelines to follow.

Its sad that we have to come to this! Where did communities go? Its beyond repair now.

Comments (1)

Whats going on with web threats? The October webinar by Trend Micro

This month, Trend Micro’s webinar was in regards to what is going on with web threats? ">This is the link to the on demand webinar. One of the things that I was quite interested in was the fact that web threats are now including sextortion. This is a term I’ve never heard of, and a brief lookup through wikipedia was quite interesting.

In an upcoming podcast, I discuss a little bit of this, what I’ve seen in my email for contact forms, and I look forward in relistening to this cast as I missed some parts.

Did you know that the majority of web threats start by email? The email is phishing in nature, but that may not always be the case. According to this, the actor may now be moving to social media platforms such as twitter, facebook, linked in, and others. The adds we see now may be melicious, and this is called Malvertising.

There’s plenty more, please feel free to check out the webinar, I am going to try and relisten to this within the coming days.

Thanks for reading, and look forward to a podcast topic on this real soon. Lets discuss what you’ve gotten and whether you’ve been bit.

Comments (0)

Today is Giving Tuesday

I don’t know when this started, but today is Giving Tuesday.

  • Make sure if you give, that it is at a reputable site.
  • If you have a Paypal account, Paypal has a section that allows you to give to charities and other places securely.
  • If you go to my Web Site and click on the donation link, I have a Paypal button. When you click or press enter, you’ll see that it redirects to a secure page. While I’d appreciate if you do donate to this network, I’m illustrating here what you should be looking for, a site that has a secure page. It should have the S after the HTTP as shown when you click on the paypal link on my page.
  • Remember to ask questions if you aren’t sure. Look for a contact link or a telephone number.
  • Criminals would love to have your hard earned money, even on this day. Look for the signs that might set them apart of other sites.

If you give to the network this year, we thank you. I want people to donate and shop securely whether it is with me or anyone else on the Internet. Thanks for reading.

Comments (0)

cyber Monday, the criminals don’t care

Hi all,

As you prepare for Cyber Monday today, the criminals will be looking to take advantage of you too. They don’t take holidays off, they look to take advantage of what is happening around the world.

  • The recent Northern and Southern California fires are still being delbt with that have occurred just after Haloween. It would not surprise me if agencies are still collecting donations to help with the massive costs involved in the cleanup and restoration of many homes. If you want to give instead of bargain shopping, thank you! Please donate to the red cross or other trusted agency, not to some email that might come in your inbox.
  • If you bargain shop, Criminals have now taken up domains that have been let go. This November 13th article talks about it in detail. You want a bargain, but you want a bargain from a trusted source.
  • If you enjoy networks like mine and want to donate there, I’ve got a donate button on one of the pages on the blog, and also my web site. The buttons are paypal, and are secure. They take you to a page that has my name, or if you donate elsewhere, the name of the person or company that it belongs to. If you question something, I’d suggest you call. If you do donate to the network this year, thanks!

I’m not asking for donations, but giving information out as to what to look for, since there is a lot of stuff happening now that we didn’t have to worry about.

In this post, comment and let me know if you’ve seen anything out of the ordinary, and what you did to spot such a thing. Please be careful no matter what you do, this Cyber Monday.

Comments (0)

Philmore Productions continues to trash its customers

Hi all,

The opinions expressed here are my own, and not necessarily those of any company in which is represented here.

I’ve been made aware of the continuing assault towards customers by the company Philmore Productions, an Illinois based company which offers voice mail services as well as a declining Internet by Phone service.

Recently, I heard from a user, wjho wanted to cancel voice mail services for one of their boxes. An Email sent by Philmore Productions customer Service, indicates another user did not have authorized access to the box that the box owner explicitly gave access to.

Lets remember something about security. First, if the box owner gives permission to someone to access their account, from what I understand, it is the box owner’s responsibility to have rules of the system followed, or have their account deleted.

Philmore Productions calss this unauthorized access to their systems, “dirty pool.”

Dirty pool: a Philmore Productions term

The problem I have with this tactic, is simple. Philmore Productions has never cared about ones privacy. Philmore Productions has never cared whether the company reputation is held up by negative coverage. As part of this blog and podcast, I’m thinking about both sides. I was once a customer of Philmore Productions, and I’ve covered both sides of this issue.

In this case, Philmore Productions is in the wrong. It is not dirty pool to give someone else access when the box owner explicitly gave that access. It would be dirty pool if the box owner did not know of the access.

He claims that the dirty pool machine is out to prevent unauthorized access from people Philmore Productions does not authorize to access the box.

Philmore productions has never supplied customer service by telephone or any other method unless it is necessary, I.E. credit card issue or another box issue where the company can’t leave you a message.

Philmore productions needs to understand the issues at hand and learn what is unauthorized or authorized access.

I still predict that Philmore productions will be closed for business within the next year, with a big player of Philmore’s business cancelling service very soon because the conference line will not exist.

I can’t say when this will occur, but if the conference line does close, and the people paying for the block of numbers doesn’t need it, Philmore Productions will suffer, and potentially raise prices to compensate for the huge loss of money.

This is only a hunch, and I could be completely wrong, but Philmore Productions staff does not understand the security aspect, and once they do, then they may have a chance. Until then, they’ll continue to suffer negative consequences at their behavior.

I hope they enjoy this, it must feel great.

Comment on your experience with this company.

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What has been going on?

Hi all,

I know I have been dormant lately, lots has been going on.

First, tech 261 has been released and can be found on the RSS feed. On it, I talk about MENVI’s 20th anniversary and how it all got started on the web.

Next, I have been reading a bunch of stuff, but have not had the time to blog. Krebs has posted some stuff about recent breaches, and it seems like thats where we’re headed. Read anything of interest from Krebs by going to this web page.

My computer up and crashed after I recorded the first segment above on 261, and I had to learn a new operating system as well as a new keyboard.

I published part 3 of the screen reader series, and started a draft of part 4 which talks about my learning the mac and just some thoughts on the different types of keystrokes and resources out there. I don’t remember enough to do a whole course on some of the commands like I did with Windows and DOS, but hopefully readers will have an understanding on the challenges of learning Voice Over which is quite complex. Read part 3 which was posted on June 28th on Omni by clicking on the link.

I’m thinking of writing something on my experience of learning Windows 10, but I’m not really sure how to do this because there is so much that is different. If you have any ideas, let me know.

I think thats it. I’ll try to post more, I’ve been dormant but read interesting things from Krebs and Trend Micro I’d like to blog about but just haven’t had the time. I hope that changes. See you all soon.

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