Something I find interesting with this big virus scare is how quick phishers have begun to change their attacks to take advantage of the Corona Virus Panic.

The Better Business Bureau has warned consumers to only purchase masks and other such supplies directly from sources that you trust as some malicious websites are creating scams to steal money from people desperate to find out of stock masks. This is one of the biggest virus scares in recent history and I am sure that their have been charlatans and snake oil salesmen who take advantage of fear and ignorance though out history. Any time of crises is ripe for exploration and humans will make a dollar any way they can.

One way that you can check to verify if a source is legitimate is to verify their contact information and to avoid any source that promises something to good to be true, because it probably is.

https://www.bbb.org/article/news-releases/21482-scam-alert-preparing-for-coronavirus-that-face-mask-could-be-a-con

One thing that has been on my mind lately is how much more capacity and speed SSD have gained over the years relative to their price. You can now acquire an SSD with 1TB of storage for under a a $100 on amazon! As these become cheaper and easier to make it makes me wonder how much longer computers will use the slower and more fragile HDD’s and when will they go the way of magnetic tape and only have use for mass storage. The only advantage they have is their cost to capacity ratio and I do not foresee that lasting much more than a decade or so if SSD’s continue to go down in cost. What sorts of media will be lost in 50 years when HDDs are so uncommon that you can no longer find a device that uses them any more.

https://www.amazon.com/Green-1TB-Internal-SSD-WDS100T2G0A/dp/B07NNRTTCM/ref=asc_df_B07NNRTTCM/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=343187928868&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=12096760765488065719&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9033273&hvtargid=pla-750016363916&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=68968886357&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=343187928868&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=12096760765488065719&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9033273&hvtargid=pla-750016363916

It has been an exciting spring quarter this year, I was made President of my tech club with all of the responsibilities that that position holds, as well as a full class load, and the biggest cyber security competition I will likely ever participate in coming up. My work life has become my personal life it seams but I have been somewhat enjoying the challenge. As the quarter begins to draw to a close its become crunch and catch up time in the work I have neglected in favor of my other responsibilities. It fells as though the more I apply myself in leadership roles the less I work on the technical aspect of my degree and I am finding it less enjoyable. I really want to apply myself in both ways and prepare for a career in the air force and perhaps one day the FBI if I am lucky, but it is going to take an additional drive that I have to dig down and find in myself.

I have a lot of excitement and expectations for my future, I just have to do my best and decide what kind of person I want to be and the future I want to have.

Recently my cybersecurity team and I completed our pre-qualifier for PRCCDC. It was a great experience and I was able to prepare some freshmen who had never had the opportunity to work with linux before. While they preformed well beyond my expectations, it was a good reminder on how much more we needed to practice to prepare for the competition. One of the ways we intend to prepare is to drill the same injects we where given during the pre qualifier to ensure we have a strong understanding of these basic concepts. For example next week we will set up a blockchain and if we have time a working lamp stack and network monitor on our virtual machines. I have a lot of confidence for our success in this competition as long as our team does its due diligence and luck shows us some favor!

Wireless headsets, mice, keyboards, printers; many of us rely on blue tooth for our day-to-day tasks. What many users might not be aware of are the dangers of using bluetooth. CVE-2020-0022is a vulnerability in android devices that could allow attackers remote access to your device. This device has been patched but shows that there are still emerging exploits that take advantage of bluetooth’s weak security and that you should be careful where you decide to take your fancy new galaxy pods.

Sources

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2020-0022

Critical Android Bluetooth Bug Enables RCE, No User Interaction Needed

Jeff Bezos was recently the victim of a malicious attack where The Washington post reports that Jeff received a “WhatsApp message laden with code that … (stole) personal data from his iPhone X”. This is a huge deal because it shows that how vulnerable the device we carry in our pocket is and even the worlds most powerful people are vulnerable to attack. As security professionals, it is important that we stay up to date with the latest security threats as they emerge to protect our assets. Following best security practices and doing our due diligence is the cornerstone of our profession.

As part of preparing for PRCCDC we are going to be working on injects. Injects are like real world situations or tasks that are given to us to accomplish during the competition. Injects are where the bulk of our points are earned so its very important to get a lot of practice with them. Some of the Injects we can expect are things like adding users to a database, updating security policies , or answering customer support calls. We have Zac Greenside coaching us this quarter, he has experience in previous competitions and we are very excited to have him!

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You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

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