Get Through Airport Security Checkpoints Faster!
For those of us with jobs that require travel, packing all the gear we need can mean bulging luggage that earns us some extra quality time with TSA personnel at airport security checkpoints – what with all those wires and electronics in our bags. Long time business traveler and uber-geek Brian Chee has a detailed a couple of tips and products that can help us minimize the items in our luggage and time spent with TSA personnel fingering our precious electronic goodies.
At the Inside Interop Blog, Brian lays out two ways to speed up your travel time. First, he looks at the iGo line of power adapters. The iGo system uses a universal power converter with several different adapter tips to fit a variety of electronics such as laptops, mobile phones, bluetooth headsets, iPods and more. And if you combine a laptop charger with iGo’s Dualpower Accessory, you charge your laptop and a small portable device, such as a phone or iPod, simultaneously – with only one charger and two cables.
As Brian points out, having four or five power chargers in your luggage for your various electronics can raise a red flag for TSA screening personnel when your bags go through the scanners. That big mess of wires probably looks likes the workings of a bomb! So save your self some weight in your luggage and some time spent in the clutches of the TSA at airport security checkpoints by getting a multi-use power adapter from a company like iGo.
Brian’s second article talks about the recent cooperative efforts of the TSA and luggage manufacturers to develop “checkpoint friendly” laptop bags. These new bags are designed to open up in such a way that the section containing the laptop can lay flat on the checkpoint screening conveyor belt, thus allowing TSA screening machines to examine the laptop without having to actually remove the laptop from the bag. Several luggage manufacturers (see below) have already brought their “checkpoint friendly” laptop bags to market. And although these bags are NOT officially endorsed by the TSA, they were developed with assistance from the TSA, using the TSA’s own laptop bag guidelines. There has even been some anecdotal evidence that these new bags are working as advertised, with their owners getting through security without having to remove the laptop from the bags.
Checkpoint friendly laptop bag manufacturers:
eBags (www.ebags.com)
CODi (www.codidirect.com)
Aerovation (www.aerovation.com)
Skooba (www.skoobadesign.com)
MobileEdge (www.mobileedge.com)
Pathfinder (www.pathfinderluggage.com)
Briggs & Riley (www.briggs-riley.com)
Targus (www.targus.com)
Mike Pennacchi and Chris Greer from Network Protocol Specialists will be presenting a webinar on July 30th. They will be explaining how to create a low cost “capture-to-disk” network sniffer appliance. Mike and Chris will also show how to use Wireshark with the saved network captures from the appliance to troubleshoot network problems.
Mike Pennachi and Chris Greer are both brilliant guys in the network troubleshooting industry. I hope that everyone will sign up for the free webinar and soak up some of the knowledge that Mike and Chris are giving out…
Network Troubleshooting Webcast Scheduled for July 30th 10am PDT. Subject – Building a Capture to Disk Appliance
Reserve your Webinar seat now at: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/299482240
Stumbled upon an article from New Scientist titled Cash Machines Hacked to Spew out Card Details, which tells about a new type of attack on bank ATM machines.
As the idea of using false fronts on bank card insertion slots to scan the magentic stripes on bank cards has become well known, banks have put in protections against this scheme and begun to thwart criminals. However, some clever criminals in Russia and Ukraine have devised a new type of attack where they insert a specially formatted bank card which tells the ATM machine to print out a list of all bank cards used during the day along with the cards’ PIN numbers and expiration dates. This information is then used to create “clone” bank cards and clean out the bank accounts of unsuspecting customers.
Even more shocking is that the criminals’ special bank card can also be used to eject a cash storage cassette from the front of some older model ATM machines.
How do they accomlish this? It was discovered that the crooks had used a malware program disguised as the lsass.exe file on the Windows operating system of the ATM machines to create a back door which can be triggered with the special bank cards. You might wonder how the criminals could get the malware onto the ATM machine’s Windows OS in the first place. According to the security analysts hired by the banks, it looks like the crooks had some inside help from bank or ATM employees bribed or coerced by the criminals.
As bad as all this sounds, the real pants-around-the-ankles fact here is that the ATM machines actually store the customers’ bank card numbers, PINs, and expiration dates without any encryption. What were they thinking? I hope that the rest of the banks and ATM manufacturers from around the world are taking note of the situation in Russia and Ukraine. They need to update their ATM infrastructure immediately to protect against such abuses. Of course, in my opinion, it’s extreme negligence to not have encrypted any crucial bank card data in the first place. An ATM machine might be very physically secure against the outside world, but we know that the majority of security breaches in business come from employees, not 15 year old kids in their parents’ basement.