It turns out that all cluster mailboxes in the Denver area have the same master key. So if someone robs a postal carrier, they can open any mailbox.
I get that a single master key makes the whole system easier, but it’s very fragile security.
Category: physical security
This is pretty horrific:
…a group of men behind a violent crime spree designed to compel victims to hand over access to their cryptocurrency savings. That announcement and the criminal complaint laying out charges against St. Felix focused largely on a single theft of cryptocurrency from an elderly North Carolina couple, whose home St. Felix and one of his accomplices broke into before physically assaulting the two victims—both in their seventies—and forcing them to transfer more than $150,000 in Bitcoin and Ether to the thieves’ crypto wallets.
I think cryptocurrencies are more susceptible to this kind of real-world attack because they are largely outside the conventional banking system. Yet another reason to stay away from them.
Consumer Reports has analyzed a bunch of popular Internet-connected video doorbells. Their security is terrible.
First, these doorbells expose your home IP address and WiFi network name to the internet without encryption, potentially opening your home network to online criminals.
[…]
Anyone who can physically access one of the doorbells can take over the device—no tools or fancy hacking skills needed.
Interesting interview:
Banks don’t take millions of dollars and put them in plastic bags and hang them on the wall so everybody can walk right up to them. But we do basically the same thing in museums and hang the assets right out on the wall. So it’s our job, then, to either use technology or develop technology that protects the art, to hire honest guards that are trainable and able to meet the challenge and alert and so forth. And we have to keep them alert because it’s the world’s most boring job. It might be great for you to go to a museum and see it for a day, but they stand in that same gallery year after year, and so they get mental fatigue. And so we have to rotate them around and give them responsibilities that keep them stimulated and keep them fresh.
It’s a challenge. But we try to predict the items that might be most vulnerable. Which are not necessarily most valuable; some things have symbolic significance to them. And then we try to predict what the next targets might be and advise our clients that they maybe need to put special security on those items.