Reasonable Doubter
About this Blog: CIO.com’s Reasonable Doubter Constantine von Hoffman keeps a close eye on technology, government, public policy, privacy and security to help readers see the forest for the trees—and the facts through the BS.
A document from ScanEye, which runs BitTorrent monitoring services to help combat piracy, includes a list of pirated movies and TV files that have been downloaded via IP addresses associated with the U.S. House of Representatives.
What did these fine folks steal in October and early November?
A lot of TV, including DeGrassi – The Next Generation, Treme, Glee, CSI, Dexter, Are We There Yet – The Thanksgiving Episode, Boardwalk Empire and, perhaps most fittingly, The Walking Dead and two episodes of Pretty Little Liars – The Lying Game and A Kiss Before Lying.
Among the movies to get the Congressional seal of illegal approval: Iron Sky, Life of Pi, Dark Knight Rises, Captain America, Flight, Tron: The Revolution, Chronicles of Riddick, Untitled International Thriller (one of my favorites), and just in time for Christmas: Bad Santa2 which hasn’t been released yet.
Moving on, the best story this week not involving Manti T’eo (everyone who believes he was a “victim” of a hoax raise your hands) is …
A security audit revealed a star developer had outsourced his own job to a Chinese subcontractor for a fraction of what he was getting paid AND had also taken jobs with other firms and had outsourced that work too, netting him hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.
Verizon investigators checked the computer habits of an employee of a client (code named "Bob"), and discovered he had hired a software consultancy in Shenyang to do his programming for him. Bob overnighted them his two-factor authentication token so they could log into his account, and he paid them a fifth of his six-figure salary to do the work.
"The analysis of his workstation found hundreds of PDF invoices from the Chinese contractors and determined that Bob's typical work day consisted of:
9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos
11:30 a.m. – Take lunch
1:00 p.m. – Ebay time
2:00-ish p.m – Facebook updates, LinkedIn
4:30 p.m. – End-of-day update e-mail to management
5:00 p.m. – Go home
The scheme worked very well for Bob. In his performance assessments by the firm's human resources department, he was the firm's top coder for many quarters and was considered expert in C, C++, Perl, Java, Ruby, PHP, and Python."
If he'd been the CEO he would have gotten a million dollar bonus.
Also in the week's IT security news:
Phishing Toolkit Uses Whitelisting To 'Bounce' Non-Victims
New Java Exploit Fetches $5,000 Per Buyer
Java Exploit Used in Red October Cyberespionage Attacks, Researchers Say
Dire Warnings Don't Yield Better Critical Infrastructure Security