Hacking the SEC

Cybertoonz is there!

Comments

[Magister]

A more amusing comic would be parallel to the 1975 Saturday Night Live fake commercial that advertised a razor with three blades; I look forward to fifty-factor authentication.

[Dr. Ed 2]

The more complicated they make the login, the more they exacerbate the human factor. Am I the only one who remembers lists of passwords on sticky notes pasted to monitors?

[Michael P]

No. The difficulty factor is the biggest reason that MFA has taken so long to adopt, and why three-factor authentication is extremely rare. Security people often want to maximize confidentiality, integrity and availability of a system -- called the C-I-A triad, possibly with tongue in cheek -- and complicated logins gain improved confidentiality and integrity at the cost of lower availability.

I am curious what fifty-factor authentication would look like, though: something you know, something you have, something you are, ... something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, ... something something something?

[Dr. Ed 2]

The best I've seem is what the big Boston hospitals use -- it appears to be RFID from the MD's name badge and a simple password.

They don't wear name badges in surgery, I *presume* they have some sort of security in the locker room, but otherwise they do. Of course you have to pay for RFID readers at every workstation, but if you're buying a few thousand workstations, it probably isn't that much more expensive.

[Magister]

No name badges, and they all wear masks in the operating room; it sounds like organ theft could become a big problem.

[Magister]

The 7th factor is checking the "I am not a robot" box.
The 10th factor is the name of your pet; the 11th through 16th factors involve biometrics of that pet.
The 23rd factor requires you to pass a Turing test, administered by an AI.
The 35th factor is knowing what the 36th factor is.
The 47th factor is calling your mother and asking her if it's you. If you haven't provided contact information for your mother, a temporary mother will have been assigned to you by the security administrators; better send her something for Mother's Day or you'll be locked out.
But after all that, HAL still won't open the pod bay doors.

[Lee Stillman]

Where does Rule 34 apply?

[Dr. Ed 2]

And then Gillette MADE a razor with three blades...

[PMBug]

The call came from inside the house.

[Dr. Ed 2]

I always wondered how Hollywood thought such a thing was possible -- back then. There were test codes you could dial to make your phone ring (great fun at parties) but you had to hang up for it to work. You could pick up two extensions and use it as an intercom, but you still had the dial tone.

This was BC -- Before Cellphones -- and on an analog POTS line, how on earth would you know WHERE on the line a call was coming from? Maybe if there were TWO phone lines to the house, and the perp was calling from one to the other, but even then you wouldn't know he was in the house. ANYONE with physical access to your pair of copper wires could make a phone call with your phone number back then -- it was a real problem in college towns.

IMHO, the movie would have been more believable if he'd left the extension off the hook so she couldn't dial for help...

[Magister]

Which movie? In Black Christmas, the killer in the sorority house used the sorority house mother's phone, a separate line (at least, according to TV Tropes). Multiple phone lines in a house were not unusual in the 1990s. If the police traced the call, they would find that the phone line calling is at the same address.

(I also recall numbers you could call that would call back after you hung up; I don't remember a dial tone. So with one phone line, the killer could make the call to have the phone ring, hang up, and wait for the victim to answer when it rings and then pick up the extension; provided that the call-back would not play a recorded message like "the call is coming from inside the house!" or the dial tone. For non-killers, it would be a low tech intercom.)

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

In the 1970s at least, we got hold of a list of all those magic numbers. One would disconnect the line; it required much hassle at the phone company to restore it. Why anyone at the phone company thought that was a good idea, I do not know.

[Dan Schiavetta]

See a certain CLE educator:

https://www.quimbee.com/cle/courses/how-the-internet-is-making-lawyering-worse-and-how-to-be-a-good-lawyer-in-spite-of-it

[Dan Schiavetta]

Baker must be in his 60s but these cartoon posts are like from a high schooler.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

That's the meme. They're supposed to look like that.

[Dan Schiavetta]

That is not a plus. It is a minus.
It is only an appeal to high schoolers, and not the good-hearted, not-afraid-to-look-like-a-fool searchers. It is to those with less courage, afraid to drop down their pants, who are frustrated and are forming their grudge against the world. You can live like that in a way, but it is a dead end.