SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Ars Technica reports:
The US Secret Service is warning hotel operators to be on the lookout for malware that steals passwords and other sensitive data from guests using PCs in business centers, according to a published report.
The non-public advisory was issued on last Thursday, KrebsOnSecurity reporter Brian Krebs reported Monday. Krebs said the notice warned that authorities recently arrested suspects who infected computers at several major hotel business centers around Dallas. In that case, crooks using stolen credit card data to register as hotel guests used business center computers to access Gmail accounts. From there, they downloaded and installed keylogging software. The malware then surreptitiously captured login credentials for banking and other online services accessed by guests who later used the compromised PCs.
The report is a poignant reminder why it's rarely a good idea to use public PCs for anything more than casual browsing of websites. Even when PCs are within eyesight of a business center employee, librarian, or other supervisor, and even when it is locked down with limited "guest" privileges, there are usually a host of ways attackers can compromise machines running either Windows or Mac OS X.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday July 15 2014, @10:11PM
Saw that in college. They had some bit of hardware effectively doing a man in the middle with the HD. Because of this the computers were really unlocked and loose on the software side. I could walk up to a machine download and install something like kazaa (this is way back) and let it get stuff for me on the fast university connection since at home I only had dial up. And of course the reboot erased all local evidence.
(Score: 2) by Tramii on Tuesday July 15 2014, @10:33PM
I used to work in one of the computer labs (many, many years ago) while I was attending college, and they had a similar setup. Every time you rebooted a computer, it would completely restore the local HD image. However, they were all connected to various network drives which did NOT get wiped. So we would keep the install files for games like Warcraft and Doom II in a hidden directory. So we would just install whatever game we wanted to play at the time, and then rebooted when we were done. Was able to play networked games for years and no one else every caught on.