A very interesting read on the overview of Kevin Mitnick's life as a hacker and his issues with New York Times reporter John Markoff. This chapter, originally slated to be Chapter 1 in Mitnick's 2002 book “The Art of Deception”, was removed by the publisher after initial printing.
What's scary is how easy it is for even a novice to steal this information. He says he bought a $39 card reader at a local retail store and plugged it into his laptop's USB port. Now when he scans a card, the device inputs the data directly into an open Excel or Word document.
PayPal has been hit by two separate technical problems that are causing transactions to appear more than once on some customers' accounts. Although the money is not actually being removed from accounts this can have the effect of freezing the account if spending limits appear to be breached.
“The police decided that wearing a rain jacket, carrying a rucksack with a laptop inside, looking down at the steps while going into a tube station and checking your phone for messages just ticked too many boxes on their checklist and makes you a terrorist suspect.”
VMware or Virtual Machine Software is an excellent tool to use for penetration training.
I went to an ethical hacking course with New Horizons and that is what
they used to train us. Each student was able to operate three or
more environments (windows 2000, Knoppix STD, and Window XP) and attack
either our own virtual network or the Instructors firewall to
demonstrate the use of Netcat for example.
It was a very cool way to learn. Years ago I was in a training
course created by Global Knowlegde for basic networking, hardware,
cisco routers and a Microsoft cert. I recall them bringing a ton
of equipment with them and having trouble getting on and off planes
with it. With a software solution like VMware they could
have carried much less equipment.
VMware allows you to operate multiple Operating Systems on one
computer. OS's such as Linux, OSX, and Windows 2003, for example
can be placed on the same system. VMware gives you the ability to
switch from one system to another with ease. My only complaint is
that it seems to be incompatible with some software you might try to
install on it. But it works with the main stuff such as protocol
suites just fine.
Vmware is great check out their free trial.