August 12, 2016 at 2:36 am
It's the 'cable repair van' camped outside your company office I'd be more worried about than a temp stealing passwords 😉
August 17, 2016 at 8:33 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (8/10/2016)
I don't think I type too hard, but I do miss the old IBM, heavy, beige, clicky mechanical keyboards. I've had a few MS keyboards over the years, and those don't seem to last long either. This Logitech, slight wave fits me nicely, and works well.I don't replace often, but in the 16 or so years I've been working from home on my own, I certainly have had 5 or 6 keyboards in that time. Rarely have I spilled coffee on the keyboards, but perhaps crumbs play a role. Usually I'll have 1-2 keys stop working and it almost prevents me from working.
Maybe a little OCD on my part with the response and performance of the keyboards.
I know I'm late to this party, but I had to post...
Steve, you can still get the classic IBM-style (buckling spring) keyboards. There's a company out there that has the license and is still putting them out, including USB models (I keep wanting to get one, but I bought a Das Keyboard a couple years back that's still chugging along) They've even got the old classic IBM layout available...
As for wireless keyboards and mice, they're not allowed where I work for the very reasons I suspect the article mentions (no, I've not read it yet.) Someone can potentially "sniff" someone's keystrokes remotely. I would say it's maybe 20-30 yards from me to the nearest public street, so all someone would need to do is sit on the sidewalk with a sniffer device, and they could pick up what I'm typing (depending on the wireless connection method.)
August 17, 2016 at 10:47 am
TomThomson (8/11/2016)
It seems to me that wireless keyboards are OK in individual offices (and in hotel rooms, which was the first case I looked at way back in 2002 or 2003) provided the signal is sufficiently low powered and the walls/doors/windows make the signal unreadable from outside the room/office. They are not OK for use in rooms where people with different privileges (or even different logins with the same privilages) are likely to be simultaneously present. I find it quite shocking that the domumantation referenced in the editorial doesn't reference anything before 2009, but suspect that that's a result of nothing being publised in reputable journals in the early days.I don't think wireless mouse is a security problem that will hand out information to atackers but it is a problem in that it allows an attack using injected mouse movements or interference that corrupts or loses mouse moveents - in particular a denial of (mouse) service attack - (and it could make you bankrupt through costing an incredible amount of money on batteries without anyone conducting an attack if it's not a rotor ball incorporated in the keyboard, or some equally low-power "mouse").
To add on to that - you'd want to ensure that you either employ NO wireless keyboards of mice in your data center or that you have appropriate dampening or interference in place. Forget key-logging - you could hijack the server simply by being able to remotely access the dongle that's plugged in. If you're not careful - wireless accessories plugged into machines within the data center could easily nullify your physical security controls.
If an admin steps away from the front of a machine within the datacenter, leaving it unlocked - you just have to connect to the little dongle, and voila - server access with admin privileges.
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
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