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posted by janrinok on Sunday November 10 2019, @05:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the watch-out-for-insiders dept.

Submitted via IRC for soylent_red

TrendMicro Employee Sold Customer Info to Tech Support Scammers

TrendMicro has an announced a security incident where an employee was stealing consumer customer information and selling it to a third-party to use in tech support scams.

In August 2019, TrendMicro learned that some of their customers running home security solutions were receiving tech support scam phone calls that impersonated TrendMicro tech support agents.

The scammers utilized information in these calls that led TrendMicro to believe that this was more than a random phone call and that it could have been an insider threat.

"The information that the criminals reportedly possessed in these scam calls led us to suspect a coordinated attack. "

After conducting an investigation, it was determined in October that these phone calls were caused by a TrendMicro employee performing unauthorized access to a customer support database, stealing consumer customer information, and selling it to third-party tech support scammers.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday November 10 2019, @11:12AM (4 children)

    by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Sunday November 10 2019, @11:12AM (#918574) Journal

    Ok Im going to keep a tally of every slimy abusive lateral power grab by a private company or employee thereof.

    SALPG Tally 2019 rough estimate +1

    You pay for antivirus, but the employee can make 2x as much money selling your trust out.

    Is there any talk of increasing wages, something that might help with this problem? No.

    Be prepared however to be tagged and watched like an animal if you are lucky enough to have the smarts and knowhow to be an admin for any data of any real value.

    Every single company and every single agency has this problem. Remember the mom of the main character in Snow Crash? She worked for the government and irrc passing the weekly investigations took up as much time and was more stressful than the actual job itself.

    On the other hand, the people who are intelligent enough understand computers, by the sheer power of our efforts efforts, have actual power derived from knowledge, and this of course threatens the epsteins and their trumpy stooges, who have no choice but to rely on our awesome services.

    As I have written before, the job ad actually reads, 'Highly intelligent technologist saught to hold our balls for us because we skipped class at the University and payed for our test scores, must be prepared to build prison for own self and have no morals or allegiances to anyone but us, and be on call 24/7. And be yelled at regularly by ignorant executives who ask for impossible things. Trial employment, 9 months, 2 weeks vacation after 18 months. And we have a ping pong table, but if you ever use it that just means you are underutilized. Please, please don't leak our data, that will make us really mad, so don't.'

    thesesystemsarefailing.net
    (good time to donate to qubes)

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @05:17PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @05:17PM (#918643)

    epstein didn't kill himself

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @10:27PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @10:27PM (#918711)

      Of course not... the voices in your head killed him.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @03:21AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @03:21AM (#918812)

    Wages are based on little more than supply and demand. Increasing wages represents either an increased demand or reduced supply for a given type of work. Huge numbers of jobs have the capability to cause immense damage if somebody actually wanted to. That doesn't factor into wages outside of the reduction in supply due to excluding types of people likely to abuse their position.

    I think the bigger picture is one of initiative. Today is probably the best time to ever be alive for a highly skilled tech individual. You can now develop and publish products that can reach millions of people, completely independently. At the extreme end you have individuals go from working class to billionaires because of one project they developed in their spare time. Referencing Notch/Minecraft there. But of course it's not a lottery. Produce a decent product and you can create a livable income even if your product doesn't turn out to be a hit. Such is the nature of making something for nothing but opportunity cost and then being able to sell thousands of copies of it.

    People come up with excuses for not doing this that make no sense. For instance, imagine you work for a company that has a contractual claim to all IP you create - not especially uncommon: develop your project on the side, save up cash enough to take several months off, quit, go enjoy life for a couple of months, launch product (you're really just a very fast programmer). The company will have 0 case against you. It's an unenforceable clause in practice. Another option, save up enough cash to take several months off, move to Thailand or some other cheap but reasonably developed nation, your "several months" money just magically morphed into "several years" money. Develop your project, launch, live big even on a negligible real income/month. Or hit a successful project and then move back to the US to pay way more for a worse quality of living (in my obviously-an-expat opinion).

    -----

    Rather than anything failing I think what we're going to see is the increasing segregation of society. People think basic income will end inequality. This seems to be based on nothing but idealism. In practice I think it's almost certainly going to introduce inequality that will make the peasants compared to kings of old look like they were equals in a commune. The reason is because of two sides of the same coin. It will remove any barrier whatsoever to success. And so indeed this will drive success for many people. But it will also simultaneously drive an increasing dehumanization for those who not only fail to succeed, but predominantly live lives of empty consumption literally 100% dependent upon those who do succeed. Opportunity is good, but it also starts to emphasize that many people fail because of themselves. And as that truth becomes more and more undeniable, there's going to be less interest in trying to help them beyond making sure they have the bare essentials for life.

    • (Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Monday November 11 2019, @03:37PM

      by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Monday November 11 2019, @03:37PM (#918962) Journal

      Interesting thoughts here thanks for responding.

      I think you are overlooking in your wage analysis the simple fact, any database admin has the keys to the kingdom, the entire kingdom. What once only the king could have, now the king has to have a team of a few dozen people who share those keys.

      That means the cost of the kingdom, in the case of trend micro, the price in bribery of turning their security feature into a wide open security hole, would be nearly the value of the entire company. Or more. Trendmicro's insides give it access to other kingdoms, a nearly unlimited number.

      This is the same issue with law enforcement backdoors, how much do you pay someone who is going to have to resist huge bribes?

      Starting a company where you have to hire people who are smarter than you, who you cannot defend yourself against electronically, OR WORSE, a mole who is connected to an APT/TLA, turns you into a middleman where you are simply the face who convinces your customers to hand over their data. This leads to a situation where once there is someone who will resist bribes, the one admin who won't hand over the password at the meeting with consultants(terry childs...), ends up protecting millions of people and being attacked by millions of badguys, a situation hardly any human could enjoy.

      No one thinks basic income is going to solve inequality, it is supposed to solve poverty AND recognize that the surplus of the entire United States has been cheated from us and put in the hands of the bezos's and goldman sachs' of the world. And cheaters don't get to keep their winnings, especially when it leads to this amount of homelessness and deterioration of quality of life.

      Any entitlements or benefits that are not adjusted to inflation will be simply subsumed by the upper classes. A 1000 dollar a month benefit would result in a 1000 dollar a month price hike in rents and interest. The banks are in the catbird seat, like social security, they rig the playing field so it leans their way.

      Your scenario for tech worker who is trying to do his own projects on the side is the story of my life. Sure it might work if you operate inside the approved areas of the cultural hegemony, and you cover up for harvey weinstein. But when you ask for something that is not on the menu, the system has a way of kicking you out and making you feel unwanted.

      Have you read my journal? If you are seen as anything but a fanboy of the current system, you will not be able to operate in that system to promote your ideas or seek capital. It is extremely unfair and tracks exactly what is predicted of plutocracies in The Republic. Even if you do start your idea, if they don't like you, they can just steel it. FB and amzn make that soooo easy, you can just flag anything that goes viral, copy it and go. The innovator loses, the oligarchy wins.

      I think this is worse than being a peasant, having my mind read, my ideas stolen and used to provide passive income to people who don't work and who demonstrably are my inferior, intellectually AND morally.

      No one, no one, is talking about ending inequality, but a situation where these people get to have powers literally just short of godhood, should be able to design a government model where no one is asleep on the street(and without killing anyone or concentration camps).

      But they can't. So not only can they, our oligarchs who claim the system rewarded them based on merit, not design a system where there are not people literally shitting openly on the streets, they are so threatened by any real solutions that they have to quasch them and repurpose them where possible.

      So your assessment in my assessment is rosy. You should consider some of the things I put up on my site to explain.

      https://jmichaelhudson.net/4-important-drawings/ [jmichaelhudson.net]
      https://jmichaelhudson.net/asocial-media-refugee/ [jmichaelhudson.net]

      The last quote in my systemsarefailing meme presentation is the hawking quote,

        "If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed."

      He added: "Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."

      And I am not going to argue with him, are you? The business owners who lock down innovation and repress other intellectuals because they come from the wrong class, are doing so to lobby against this redistribution, and for either a hell on earth or the end of the species.

      #pickaside