Recently in Physical Security Category
Smash and grab thefts performed on parked cars have been in the news more recently. People purchase GPS, ipods and satellite radio units and leave them in their car. This allows thieves easy access to resell-able items.
This week, we received notice that one of the other parking garages in our office park had been hit.
AAA World magazine has a good article on that issue this month. (page 33)
Obviously, you bought these gadgets to use them. You need to take it with you or keep it out of plain site. The problem with hiding it, is you still have that suction cup mount on the windshield advertising goodies inside the car. Do you really have time to take that down too? What about the obvious residue of the suction cup ring? That advertises as well. That seems like too much to deal with to me. At a minimum hide the valuables.
With GPS devices, use the PIN lock if one is included. This protects your important addresses. The thief may not be interested in all the Ci-Cis Pizza locations in the U.S. but he might want to see what toys your have at home since he knows you'll be at work.
Record the serial number, original cost, and save the receipt. This could aid in recovery or with insurance.
These kinds of thefts are on the rise in commuter parking lots, malls, and other garages. Take heed and avoid being a victim.
I just saw that CourtTV (CourtTV is TruTV as of 1/1/2008) had a pen testing show called Tiger Team that aired a couple of times last week. GrumpySecurityGuy calls it "It Takes a Thief" with a security twist.
Don't go in expecting this show to be about a Red Team in a dark room somewhere running zero day attacks while the Symantec Security NOC is soiling themselves because green lights turn to red on a big board on the wall. It doesn't look like we're going to see Chloe say "its ok we've got the Cisco Self-Defending network”. The episodes I've seen have had the team attempt to penetrate small very secure businesses. You don’t need to bust through a firewall or wait for a phishing reply when you can just hand someone a USB key and ask them to print out a document from it.
The team is has a social engineer, a computer security guy and a physical security guy (if I remember the introductions correctly). In the first caper they take down security at a high end car dealership. In the second episode they go after an elite exclusive Jewelry design shop. Both episodes were a heck of a lot of fun.
Preview:
Hopefully we’ll be seeing more of these episodes. I don’t see any upcoming episodes in the program guide data. I also couldn’t find the episodes on the CourtTV website. I had to bittorrent them (kids don’t try that at work).
I was home last week when a couple of guys knocked on my door. I hate it when people ignore the no solicitation sign that is at the entrance to our community.
They were wearing Honeywell shirts and said they were in the neighborhood offering to upgrade five people to the latest greatest alarm system for free.
I talked with them a bit about what the alarm system could do, and they did talk a good game. But the situation seemed kind of hinky to me. Isn't that just what a bad guy would do to try and find out what security protections I have.
