• (cs) in reply to FredSaw
    FredSaw:
    So it's a variant of the old barroom tale -- "I'll bet you $100 I can get that woman to take off her blouse here in the bar." ... "I'll give you $50 to take off your blouse."
    Shit, there are some areas of England where I can hire a woman to do that for a $5 drink. I'd be quite happy to be the middle-man on that "joke."

    And now, back to the OP:

    #!usr/bin/python

    Paying someone $10 to pull a power cord for $3500

    print "(C) <Name Removed> 2008."

    Unusually, nobody has posted the obvious code snippet required to make this work:

    print "(C) %s %d." % ("<Name Removed>", 2008)

    There you go. I reckon that's worth at least $5000 in future-proofing the idea. When I get that, we can experiment with a hundred girls from somewhere like Oklahoma, Fred.

    Well, it worked for me.

  • (cs) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    You know, you guys could just get an actual gf, or even a wife, and see all the boobs you want!

    But wouldnt that cost a LOT more then 50$????

  • (cs) in reply to NeoMojo
    NeoMojo:
    ChiefCrazyTalk:
    snoofle:
    You know, you guys could just get an actual gf, or even a wife, and see all the boobs you want!

    Nope, could only see 2 in that case.

    Perhaps you prefer the triple breasted whore of eroticon 6...

    Schouldnt that actually say "2 out of 4 (or 6 for some exotic loving geeks) at a time"???

  • (cs) in reply to codemonkey
    codemonkey:
    Why on earth do the cleaners have access to the server room to be able to unplug it in the first place. Are the servers located in the janitors broom closet?

    Thats the WTF!!!

    I argued this point with our building operations manager for 3 weeks; I even escalated it to the president (at the time) of the organization to no avail. Her argument was "Things get dusty and the computers will short circuit". My argument was that if the cleaners weren't in and out of the room every night with their dirty mops (don't EVEN get me started) and dusters, there would be NOTHING to clean... the A/C passes both fresh and return air through a dust filter (that thankfully, does get changed regularly), and the room has positive-pressure. Unless you dump a bag of dust IN There, nothing's getting in (well, not much, at least).

    Yet still, every night, they dutifully check the trash can for garbage that I now only dump in there out of pity, they WET-mop the floor on a monthly basis, and sweep every few days... except where there are cable-cuttings from the punch-down blocks; those they are perfectly content to leave.

    But hey, what else would you expect but a rigorous cleaning regimen from an organization that is so thorough about its backups.

  • Peter Duvelind (unregistered) in reply to Kiefer Rodriguez

    This is one of the best proofs of the need to protect the computers both from harm via the network and from physical harm via people that can easily be fooled.

    Your 'superhacker' may have pulled a fast one on you, but the lesson should be learned either way.

    I think everybody has a story where someone else pulled the wrong power-cord and your 99.9999% uptime went down the drain.

  • info[at]Alan PC[dot]com (unregistered) in reply to Kiefer Rodriguez

    What I find funny Kiefer is your statement about not being able to find the python interpreter.

    Try these commands next time you think you have to manually traverse *nix directory to find a binary.

    which [command] whereis [binary]

    you could have supplied "python" to both as paramenters and recieved back the path where it was located.

    And that outside guy should have been shot! Wasn't even hacking. Your boss should be shot too! For thinking that was hacking.

  • Bob (unregistered)

    Guy advertises services to small business. He claims to be good at what he does. Management believes him. Turns out he is indeed good at what he does.

    I guess the WTF is that there is no WTF? This might be a good story for a blog without direction, but TD WTF should have standards. Every story should, at the end, leaving you thinking "WTF?"

  • Tom (unregistered)

    Actually, he made an excellent point: it only cost him $10 to take down your company's server. It's called social engineering and it's a very effective way of hacking.

  • HearWa (unregistered)

    Kevin Mitnick would be proud.

  • leerkracht (unregistered) in reply to Sad Bug Killer

    cowerf4

  • Eddy (unregistered) in reply to Kiefer Rodriguez
    Kiefer Rodriguez:
    For those of you claiming the story to be a work of fiction, I can assure you the story is genuine. The shebang line should have been '#!/usr/bin/env python' but I was in a rush when submitting the story and could not locate the actual .py file, and in my haste didnt bother to actually think anyone would care about the shebang line, the script did have more to it (details of the operations it was claiming to undertake etc) but cut them out to save space and to make it easier to understand for any non-programmer TDWTF readers (As if you dont understand the code - You wont get the joke). Management (remember, were quite a small ISP operation, no more than 30-40 workers) did not bother to write up a contract for the security audit, nor bother to check his credentials (remember- small business).

    And believe it or not, management rarely read bugfixes, patches, etc for their content, they just want to know everything works.

    Capcha: transverbero ..Cmon! Thats not even a word! :P

  • Carter (unregistered)

    Gotta spend money to make money.

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