With some clever new card skimmer tech we’ve got one more reason to watch your wallet at the gas pump, plus a few handy recommendations for postgres migrations & Dan dives deep into his quest for the ultimate boot and nuke experience.

Plus your feedback, a fantastic round-up & so much more!

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Show Notes:

Gas Pump Skimmer Sends Card Data Via Text

• Skimming devices that crooks install inside fuel station gas pumps frequently rely on an embedded Bluetooth component allowing thieves to collect stolen credit card data from the pumps wirelessly with any mobile device. The downside of this approach is that Bluetooth-based skimmers can be detected by anyone else with a mobile device. Now, investigators in the New York say they are starting to see pump skimmers that use cannibalized cell phone components to send stolen card data via text message.

• Skimmers that transmit stolen card data wirelessly via GSM text messages and other mobile-based communications methods are not new; they have been present — if not prevalent — in ATM skimming devices for ages.

• But this is the first instance KrebsOnSecurity is aware of in which such SMS skimmers have been found inside gas pumps, and that matches the experience of several states hardest hit by pump skimming activity.

• see also Gas Theft Gangs Fuel Pump Skimming Scams

Erasing hard drives – dd might be enough – Dan talks about how he erased the drives

• I recently upgraded several 3TB drives to 5TB drives and no longer needs the smaller drives. I usually used DBAN, but this time, it failed to run and I have no idea why

• I started looking around for upgrades in case my newer hardware didn’t work with this version of DBAN

• In September 2012, Blancco of Finland announced its acquisition of DBAN – Windows binary – no use to me

• There is an unofficial fork of DBAN that is actively maintained. The dwipe program that DBAN uses has been forked and is available as a standalone program called Nwipe, which is actively maintained.

• Appears to be more than one unofficial dban fork

• nwipe is included with Parted Magic so I paid my $11 and downloaded UNetbootin and tried to install it

• I failed to get my latest version (2017_06_03) of Parted Magic to boot so I resorted to letting UNetbootin download and install Latest_Live and I think that was 2.4

• I was told DBAN is drive abuse and that dd is sufficient

• Highly recommended NAS configuration – KIds don’t try this at home!

• Originally thought to be serial, butlater confirmed to work in parallel

• Discussion on: when you power cycle, how long do you want to power on?

• Next, tried nwipe but found that that took too long

• Going back to Parted Magic, I found the disk erase UI to have a few interesting features

• Then, I managed to get my SAS2008 card to work, and started doing 8 drives at a time

• dd is always an option, but I found it more convenient to use Parted Magic. Why? I didn’t have to script it and I can use the Secure Erase feature

Feedback

• A question about database migrations – apgdiff SQL Manager – SQLFairy – Dan used to use a tool for designing the database, but hasn’t use one lately. Now he constructs the DDL on the fly to amend the database and keeps them aside for upgrading the production database. Dan once kept the DDL for FreshPorts in a repo, but no longer does. Now he just backs up.

• ZFS Configuration new System76 Oryx pro

• Nigel Brownsey wrote in about Password security all about length

• PostgreSQL password hashing & backups

Round Up:

• The HDFS Juggernaut – Hadoop Distributed File System

• Plans for Partitioning in PostgreSQL v11

• debian-policy: Packages should be reproducible

• Everything You Always Wanted to Know
  About Optical Networking –
  But Were Afraid to Ask
  slides – Youtube video

• Looking at public Puppet servers

• Airbnb’s preferred smart lock vendor accidentally bricks 500 door-locks

• I Bought a Book About the Internet From 1994 and None of the Links Worked