[techtalk] Physical security example

coldfire rolick571 at duq.edu
Wed May 16 22:41:23 EST 2001


> > the point of all this? Sometimes, you don't need to consider what the worst 
> > possibility is; you just need to consider what will actually be going on 
> > under real-world conditions. Sure, there's a half-dozen sysadmin friends 
> > who come over on a regular basis who *could*, the next time I leave them 
> > unattended in the kitchen for five minutes, stick a boot floppy in the 
> > drive, smack Ctrl-Alt-Del twice, and quickly change my root password to 
> > whatever they wanted.

i'm paranoid .. even though i live in the middle of no where and have
very few guests, all of my boxen have bios passwords set with a boot
sequence of <primary drive> first then other media.  lilo is passworded
on windows partitions and restricted on linux partitions.

> And I have one (or three (the other being no smoking and no bowling
> (which covers Everything(tm)))) rule in my house: do not reboot any
> computers without told so!
> 
> One guy - which I didn't know, he was a friend of someone I thought I
> could trust (well, I do, I think they just met the same night) - once
> was in a party at late night in our room. He was sitting in the living
> room with my bf and some friends. Suddenly he went to the computer,
> mumbeled something about playing and rebooted it! It had an uptime of
> about 300 days so I was pretty serious about not rebooting it (it had a
> load of 4 due to some zombie netscape procs that didn't die, but uptime
> was more important). When I heard he was rebooting I got FURIOUS!

dude ... i would've killed the !@#$%^.


abe





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