Tag: mistake | Page 3

AT&T says hiring Trump lawyer was “big mistake,” forces top lobbyist out

May 13, 2018/in Internet Security

AT&T has told employees that hiring President Trump’s personal lawyer was a “big mistake.” AT&T is also reportedly forcing its chief lobbyist to retire.

“Our company has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons these last few days and our reputation has been damaged,” AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told employees in an internal memo Friday. “There is no other way to say it—AT&T hiring Michael Cohen as a political consultant was a big mistake.”

The memo was published by The Washington Post. The memo said that chief lobbyist Bob Quinn is retiring, “but a person familiar with the matter said Mr. Quinn was being forced to leave,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Amazon S3 problem caused by command line mistake during maintenance

March 3, 2017/in Internet Security

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has explained the hours-long service disruption that caused many websites and Internet-connected services to go offline earlier this week.

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team was debugging a problem in the S3 billing system on Tuesday morning when one team member “executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process,” Amazon wrote in a post-mortem describing the incident. That’s when things went wrong. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended. The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.”

An index subsystem that “manages the metadata and location information of all S3 objects in the [Virginia data center] region” was one of the two affected, Amazon wrote. “This subsystem is necessary to serve all GET, LIST, PUT, and DELETE requests. The second subsystem, the placement subsystem, manages allocation of new storage and requires the index subsystem to be functioning properly to correctly operate. The placement subsystem is used during PUT requests to allocate storage for new objects.”

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Technology Lab – Ars Technica

Yes, even coders make the mistake of reusing passwords

June 17, 2016/in Computer Security

GitHub has issued a security advisory:

On Tuesday evening PST, we became aware of unauthorized attempts to access a large number of GitHub.com accounts. This appears to be the result of an attacker using lists of email addresses and passwords from other online services that have been compromised in the past, and trying them on GitHub accounts. We immediately began investigating, and found that the attacker had been able to log in to a number of GitHub accounts.

The end result is that for some accounts “other personal information including listings of accessible repositories and organizations may have been exposed.” Yuck.

GitHub has reset passwords for affected accounts and is reaching out to affected users.

It’s important to underline that GitHub itself didn’t suffer a breach. The passwords were probably gleaned from mega-breaches on other sites such as LinkedIn and Tumblr.

Repeat after me:

Thou shalt not make to thyself the same password on different websites, and thou shalt enable two-factor authentication pronto.

Graham Cluley