MTA and McAfee Fail

Hello everyone and welcome back to BCB. Just a reminder for everyone that registration for summer semester has begun so please register in order to allow you get the classes you want. As posted in my last post i have a very interesting news regarding our very own MTA as well as a security fail from McAfee.

It seems like this is becoming a weekly occurrence. Huge companies having complete lapses in security. This weeks victim is New Yorks very own MTA. We all know the MTA is under extreme pressure to validate their budgets and explain where the money goes without raising our fares (which they will do regardless). The latest security issue can possibly cost the MTA millions of dollars which can spell bad news for New York transit riders. I first heard the story on a Paul DotCom Security Weekly podcast and read it on The Renderlab. The story was originally reported in the NY Daily News on April 24th. Supposedly the MTA has an issue with people selling Magic Keys for $27 a piece, why this is an issue is because the Magic Key is a key that allows riders to not have to pay for rides on the subway and also opens some private areas in stations. According to the NY Daily News article the police have been diligent in arresting people either using or selling the Magic Keys but it is still an ongoing problem. To make matters worse is in the NY Daily News article there is a picture of one of the reporters holding up a key that may be the actual “Magic Key.” The problem with that is that hackers and professional locksmiths can make copies of these keys using the photograph. The Renderlab article explains how this can be done and that researches have successfully made working copies of keys using photographs. If this is an issue the MTA will have to replace hundreds of locks on security gates and doors at hundreds of stations costing millions of dollars, and who do you think is going to pay for it, you guessed it every New Yorker and every rider of the subway.

This is a serious issue and i hate to see what the fall out will be if the MTA investigation into the issue comes up with the solution to replace all the locks. The next security fail story is from McAfee.

As many know on April 21, 2010 McAfee had what we call in the IT realm as an “Epic Fail.” As reported on CNET on April 22nd, McAfee released a buggy virus definition that attacked a specific Windows XP executable. The virus software registered the SVCHOST.exe as a virus and either quarantined the file or deleted it. This prompts a Blue Screen of Death that starts a reboot process. Upon reboot the system cannot find the SVCHOST.exe and reboots again and this continues. Svchost.exe is an executable that is needed to run certain services on your computer such as audio, themes and DHCP to name a few. Without that file these services cannot run and crashes the system. Many businesses such as police, hospitals, financial institutions and jails were brought to a grinding halt when their systems crashed. McAfee quickly pulled the bad file from its distribution servers but the damage had already been done. This raises a whole slew of questions such as, “Are Anti-Virus companies actually testing the virus definitions?” If the answer to that question is yes then how did this get out without being noticed? The biggest concern is if all it took was one bad bug to cause this much disruption, what must we do to fix this? Just some food for thought!!!

This goes to show you that no matter how much big companies focus on security and making sure things are working properly. For these two companies to have such huge lapses in security is baffling and the bottom line it will or has cost consumers millions of dollars.

Graduation and Week 5

Hey every one and welcome back to the BCB. A reminder to all students that registration for the summer session is now underway and to register as soon as possible in order to insure that you get the classes you want. I cannot tell you how many times i have heard students complain about their schedule because they waited to long to register. I want to apologize for taking so long to post but i am now just coming off my Graduation/Birthday high. As many Berkeley college students know commencement took place last friday April 30th at the IZOD center. A total of 1400 students graduated as the class of 2010 but by my estimate we had about 500 or so in attendance for the ceremony. Despite having that many students the ceremony took only 2 hours and 15 minutes which is outstanding. I remember going to my wife's graduation from LaGuardia Community College which had roughly about the same amount of students and it took over 3 hours to get done so i tip my hat to Student Development and Campus Life.

We have just finished week 5 and are entering the half way point of the Spring semester. Week 6 is usually Midterm week so i wish everyone who is taking a Midterm this week good luck. So far classes have been good so far. Poetry is a really easy Upper Liberal Arts class to take. I would recommend it to anyone that needs to get rid of an Upper Liberal Arts class but are already taking a lot of difficult classes. International economics is an interesting class because there is a lot of stuff going on now that pertain to the class. One of those topics are what is currently going on in Europe with Greece. Greece as a country is practically bankrupt and is soliciting the European Union (EU) for some help. There are a lot of issues that led to Greece's downfall and it is a combination of investing in a lot of public works and countries while not keeping money in the country. What didn't help is they have not been collecting the taxes needed to keep the country afloat. This has spurred a lot of controversy among the EU to solve the issue of helping Greece.

It also just so happen that on the day of class we had the biggest swing in stock prices dropping all the way down by 1000 points before rebounding. That alone opened up a discussion in my class about the volatility of the markets. The next day NASDAQ confirmed that it was not a computer glitch and cancelled all trades that were executed during the time frame when the markets plummeted. It looks like this is going to be even more of an interesting class given the current state of the world markets. Anyway that is all for now i will have a new security post that will be important for all New Yorkers and I will also have some album reviews for Sevendust, Bullet For MY Valentine, Godsmack and Deftones. I will also be going to a Korn concert so i will have all these details for everyone.