Sleepless in Midland

Bang the drum slowly -- Tony Adams counted the drum beats in the Astros sign stealing scandal

This is one of those things that makes the internet such a valuable resource.

A fellow named Tony Adams did the painstaking task of watching reruns of as many Astros' games as he could find. Then he documented the number of times someone banged on a garbage can -- one of the signals used by the sign watcher to alert a batter what kind of pitch to expect.

Here's his opening statement:

I’m an Astros fan. They cheated during the 2017 regular season — the evidence is clear. In an attempt to understand the scope of the cheating and the players involved, I decided to listen to every pitch from the Astros’ 2017 home games and log any banging noise I could detect. These are the results of my efforts. I’ve logged over 8,200 pitches and found banging before over 1,100 of those pitches.

See a bar graph of his results at Sign Stealing Scandal.

It's a truly remarkable piece of work.

------
3:33 PM 2/4/2020

When a bargain is too good to be true: Dollar General and Dollar Tree fined in NY for selling old goods

Dollar General and Dollar Tree are popular stores that often have some good prices. But a prudent customer should always shop defensively. Here's a link to an article about a fine New York state assessed against two store chains -- link Dollar General and Dollar Tree fined $1.2 million for selling expired drugs, NY AG says. Excerpt:

Retail discounters Dollar General and Dollar Tree will pay $1.2 million in fines for selling expired products, the New York attorney general announced Monday.

The investigation also called out Family Dollar, which was acquired by Dollar Tree in 2015. All the chains sold expired over-the-counter drugs, while Dollar General was fined for selling motor oil unsuitable for modern cars; Dollar Tree also violated New York’s bottle deposit law, law enforcement officials said. ...

Motor oil is motor oil, right? Maybe not. More:

They said motor oil not suitable for most engines built after 1930 were also sold at Dollar General stores.

Oh, but the prices were so low!

------
3:22 PM 8/30/2019

Skimmers found in San Antonio

A couple of years ago credit card skimmers had a field day on unprotected gasoline station credit card readers here in Midland, Texas. But they seem to have moved on. Where to? San Antonio, at least for the time being.

See Records: 11 credit card skimmers found at San Antonio gas stations in April:

This month's tally is significantly less than the previous month. In March, police found 25 credit card skimmers around town.

In the first four months of 2019, police have found and confiscated 72 skimmers total in San Antonio.

This crude device was in a photo that accompanied the San Antonio Express News article.

Meanwhile, the FDIC lists four common skimming devices, as follows:

Card-reader overlays
Hidden cameras
PIN-capture overlays, and
Fake ATM faceplates

About all the consumer can do is watch out for anything suspicious looking.

------
3:55 PM 5/14/2019

Mark Riddell -- smart test taker, dumb business man

Mark Riddell was the guy hired by William "Rick" Singer to take college entrance exams for the rich parents who were willing to pay big bucks to get their kid into a prestigious school. Riddell was so smart he was able to get just about any score he thought might be plausible for the kid.

But get this. Riddell was only paid around $10,000 per test. Meanwhile, the ringleader, Singer, charged the parents "anywhere between $200,000 and $6.5 million for this service."

Talk about income inequality! But while this might appear on its face to be unfair to Riddell, it helps to remember who actually brought the buyer and seller together. Riddell just wasn't a very good negotiator. Oh yeah, it might also help to remember that everyone involved in the scam was scum.

------

4:35 PM 3/19/2019

It's getting to be too easy to get phished

It used to be easy to spot fake URLs. But Krebsonsecurity.com tells us we need to be careful. We know that already, but wait til you see Half of all Phishing Sites Now Have the Padlock. Dang.

But it's not just about the padlock. There are scam URLs that look almost identical to the real ones. The example he provides shows a screen shot of a website that appears to be a login screen for Bilbox, a cryptocurrency exchange. He invites visitors to click on the screen shot and try to spot a clue that it's fake.  Here's a closeup to make it easy.

The "i" in Bilbox is the "ỉ" from the Vietnamese alphabet which has a dot at the top different from the "i" in the English alphabet. Therefore, it's a different website than the one the user expected.

Be wary.

------

4:33 PM 11/28/2018

At the grocery store -- Shop defensively this holiday season

The prudent shopper will always shop defensively, but it's perhaps more important during the busy times, like pre-Thanksgiving.

There is always the threat of a dangerous bacterium, like the potential for e.coli in Romaine lettuce the CDC warned us about.

For the frugal shopper, there's also the threat of paying more for the groceries than is actually owed. Here's a case in point.

You'll notice the label on the side of this avocado spread advertising 50% off. The fine print on the label explains to the cashier how to give the discounted price to the customer. But the modern system of bar code readers allow the cashier to ring up products very fast, and it's easy for a cashier to accidentally ignore such a label. Also, it might be tempting to a cashier in a hurry to intentionally ignore the label.

As it happened, I paid full price for the avocado spread when I bought it yesterday. The issues was resolved today at the store's service center. But doesn't it seem as though the mistakes always favor the merchant and not the customer? One has to wonder, if that was the plan, how that plan would actually be implemented. But it does seem that way.

------

11:36 AM 11/21/2018

chips in credit cards didn't cut fraud that much

The suggestion for this post comes to us by way of a post at boingboing which relies heavily on an item at Geminiadvisory titled Card Fraud on the Rise, Despite National EMV Adoption from last May.

While the chips on our credit cards may help, they certainly don't prevent fraud at the point of sale -- called "card-present fraud." Here are the key findings from Geminiadvisory:

- 60 million US payment cards have been compromised in the past 12 months.

- 45.8 million or 75% are Card-Present (CP) records and were stolen at the point-of-sale devices, while only 25% were compromised in online breaches.
- 90% of the CP compromised US payment cards were EMV enabled.
- The US leads the rest of the world in the total amount of compromised EMV payment cards by a massive 37.3 million records.
- Financially motivated threat groups are still exploiting the lack of merchant EMV compliance.
- An imminent shift from card-present to card-not-present fraud is already evident with a 14% increase in payment cards stolen through e-commerce breaches in the past 12 months.

And there's this:

Based on the proprietary Gemini Advisory telemetry data collected from various dark-web sources over several years, we have determined that in the past 12 months at least 60 million US cards were compromised. Of those, 75% or 45.8 million were CP records, likely compromised through card-sniffing and point-of-sale (POS) breaches of businesses such as Saks, Lord & Taylor, Jason’s Deli, Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen, Forever 21, and Whole Foods. To break it down even further, 90% or 41.6 million of those records were EMV chip-enabled.

The card-present fraud is committed by malware, skimmers, or shimmers. Krebsonsecurity has a pretty good explanation of how the old skimmers worked. See Pro-Grade Point-of-Sale Skimmer They wouldn't work on a chipped card, but the newer version -- "shimmer" -- would.

What's a Shimmer? Here's the definition provided at Credit Card Glossary:

A paper-thin, card-size shim containing an embedded microchip and flash storage is inserted into the “dip and wait” card slot of an ATM or gas pump payment terminal that's indoors or outdoors. There it resides unseen to intercept data off your credit or debit card’s EMV chip for fraudsters. The intercepted data is used to create a magnetic stripe version of the card that can be used in payment terminals that haven't been updated with EMV chip technology.

The old saw still holds true: Deception, by definition, is always one step ahead of detection. So be aware.

------

2:15 PM 11/11/2018

Can customers trust Wells Fargo not to replace their assets with a box full of rocks?

We'll get to that commercial in a moment, but first, every few months we see reports of some wrong doing at Wells Fargo. Here's the latest -- Wells Fargo Said to Face DOJ Probe of Wholesale-Banking Unit. This excerpt sums up the recent and current scandals:

Wells Fargo & Co. is facing a Department of Justice investigation into whether employees in the company’s wholesale-banking business improperly altered customer data, a person familiar with the matter said. ...

The problems began erupting in 2016, when regulators said the bank had opened millions of accounts without customers’ permission, leading to a public outcry and spurring additional scrutiny. Incorrect fees in the firm’s wealth-management unit and inconsistent pricing in the foreign-exchange business came next.

Last month, the bank disclosed another round of lapses, saying it faces a U.S. inquiry into its purchase of low-income housing credits and conceding it may have unnecessarily foreclosed on about 400 homeowners.

I've got an account at Wells Fargo, and other than charging a fee to get copies of the checks I write, I haven't discovered any other reason to complain. I should however, recount my experience with a dishonest Wells Fargo banker.

It happened a few years ago when I tried to redeem an inherited HH savings bond. Anyone who has redeemed one of those knows that the procedure is slightly complicated by the requirement that the bond owner's signature has to be verified with a green medallion seal which some bankers are qualified to provide.

So I asked a Wells Fargo banker to please do that, and she insisted that it was unnecessary. Any teller could notarize the signature, thus verifying it, I was told. Either the banker did not read the instructions on the back of the bond, she didn't comprehend the instructions, or she was lying. I asked if she was qualified to use the green medallion, and she said "no." Please proceed to a teller.

So I got in line to talk with a teller. The teller dutifully notarized my signature, but then she read it and understood that it required a green medallion seal which she wasn't qualified to have. I asked who there could do it, and she directed me to the banker with whom I had just talked. Turns out that banker was the only one present at time who did posses and could use the green medallion seal.

Whoa, that was the same banker who had just told me she didn't have and wasn't qualified to use the green medallion. So she clearly lied about that. However, she eventually applied the proper seal over the notary public seal. It looked awful, but I mailed it in anyway, and the government accepted it and redeemed the bond.

Anyway, this was a no-loss type of foul, and there was really nothing I wanted to do about it. The banker was motivated by laziness rather than a desire to steal.

But I've avoided dealing with Wells Fargo bankers since then. And the idea of an investment through them brings to mind the commercial in which the voice-over tells us about Wells Fargo hiding the gold in another box while handing over a box filled with rocks to the stage coach robbers. Made for a nice story, but today it's the customers, not the robbers, who have to be on alert for the box full of rocks.

------

1:39 PM 9/8/2018

Stunner -- fake racist claim right here in West Texas

These days whenever we see or hear a news item in which one individual describes some act of racism it's probably a prudent approach to give it at least a 50% chance of being fake.

But it's probably hard for a reporter to put that principle in effect when he is staring at a super salacious story about racism.

That's what happened in our neighbor city of Odessa, TX, the other day. You've probably heard the story. First, a waiter claimed that a customer wrote a racist note on a receipt. Here's the Odessa American's first report complete with a glowing portrayal of the claimant: Racist receipt at restaurant condemned.

It took the restaurant owner's own investigators to do the fact checking -- the note was faked. But let's give credit to the Odessa American for reporting that important narrative breaker a week later in Saltgrass COO, waiter say racism story made up. Oops.

Does anyone wonder why so many people don't trust the media?

P.S. Newspeak addition: "Terrorist" is now a racial epithet.

------

5:37 AM 7/25/2018

By hiring Susan Rice Netflix says it's criteria for new hires is the willingness to tell huge whoopers and get away with it

Susan Rice's resume must be so padded it could replace at least a dozen of those pillows those obnoxious TV ads tout several times a day.

That resume must have impressed Netflix. Susan Rice, ex-Obama official, appointed to Netflix board of directors.

Rice's claim to fame in conservative circles is the big lie she told everyone about how a movie inspired the murders in Benghazi. Lie number two would be the one she told about unmasking Republicans which gave the Democrat Media Complex ammo with which to smear them.

But Netflix hired her in spite of that, or maybe because lies of that magnitude required quite some skill.

In any event, that tells us something about Netflix. I'm not currently a customer, but if I were I would be inclined to wonder what lies have, are, or will come out about Netflix which made them think they needed someone with Rice's skill for mendacity.

------

2:48 PM 3/29/2018

North Korea wants to talk Olympics with South Korea

One has to wonder whether North Korean athletes will come to the games doped up to win. If so, one has to hope they get caught.

But this is interesting: Before Olympics, North Korea Offers Direct Talks With South Korea. Next thing you know, South Korea Proposes Talks With North Before Olympics.

OK. Maybe the leaders of the two countries will engage in some entertaining but meaningless wager like politicians here do. Unfortunately, Kim Jong Un appears to have no sense of humor. And if the past serves as predictor, Kim will simply use any hint of peace to buy time to build weaponry.

------

4:14 PM 1/2/2018

XCOR goes belly up without ever getting off the ground

According to the morning paper, XCOR filed chapter 7. And only now is the Midland Development Corporation scrambling to perfect a security interest in personal property that the MDC financed. Here are the sad facts from said article:

Hilliard told the Reporter-Telegram on Thursday that the economic development group is attempting to get a collateralized security interest in XCOR. The MDC took the step of filing uniform commercial code (UCC) financing statements with the Texas, California and Florida secretaries of state Wednesday.

Per the MDC’s contract with XCOR, incentive money was paid upfront without collateral. The deal predates Hilliard’s involvement with the MDC.

Perfecting a security interest is one of the FIRST things you do, not the LAST.

Oh, what the hell. Midland got lots of good, nationwide publicity when they announced the deal. There was no steak, but there was lot's of sizzle. As I've said in this blog in the past, that was the payoff. Too bad that was all we got, but it will have to do.

Oh yeah, I guess I should mention this group of winners. The lawyers involved in this fiasco will make out OK. So not everyone lost.

------

8:47 AM 11/11/2017

Good lesson from Florida -- anyone buying at foreclosure auction should check for prior liens

This link showed up at Lucianne.com and is worth a look see: Florida couple stunned to learn $458,000 paid for gulf-front condo may be for nothing.

Apparently, they bid online without checking the deed records for the property. In this case there was a prior lien on the property, and if that lien holder foreclosed, the buyer there could take the property away from the buyer at the previous auction.

If you read the linked article you'll see that there's a lawsuit threatened, and we can't predict how that would turn out. Nevertheless, this is a cautionary tale for all those would-be house flippers inspired by the TV shows. A safer bet might be to stick with the cooking shows.

------

12:36 PM 7/5/2017

Do we really need credit protection when the credit card companies are looking out for their customers?

It's hard to listen to the radio or watch TV these days without hearing or seeing a commercial for a service wanting to protect us from identity theft. If they could do it, they would probably arrange to have the commercials played right after one of those all too frequent news reports about a huge data breach. Like this one.

But the idea of someone using a person's personal information to apply for credit, while conceivable, probably isn't very practical considering how cautious companies are about extending credit.

So should we be worried that someone will purloin our identities and get credit cards with it? I have my doubts. This is a personal anecdote and may not have general application. But here it is. The other day I purchased something at Walmart.com for the first time. My credit card number was declined. After the third try, I phoned the credit card company to find out why. Turns out the credit card fraud department had flagged the transaction and triggered the rejection. Why was it flagged? No reason other than that the card information was used at Walmart.com. Odd.

Walmart probably doesn't appreciate business lost due to automatic fraud alerts simply for using their website for a purchase. On the other hand, Amazon must love it since Walmart is angling to take away customers who may otherwise have gone there.

Back up your hard drive ahead of the next ransomware offensive

The massive ransomware strike last week is a wake up call. And I'm certainly not going to hit the snooze button.

See An NSA-derived ransomware worm is shutting down computers worldwide. Quote:

The malware, known as Wanna, Wannacry, or Wcry, has infected at least 75,000 computers, according to antivirus provider Avast. AV provider Kaspersky Lab said organizations in at least 74 countries have been affected, with Russia being disproportionately affected, followed by Ukraine, India, and Taiwan. Infections are also spreading through the United States. The malware is notable for its multi-lingual ransom demands, which support more than two-dozen languages.

Bold added so you'll be sure to notice that sentence. It's spreading.

Most of us keep our antivirus software up to date and run them regularly. But that's no guarantee. It's a good idea to make regular back-ups to a portable drive so that if some malware did slip through and some unseen creep demanded money to let you back into your computer, you can say SOD OFF!

There are several programs out there that make backing up easy -- I'm fond of RichCopy myself. I've used it on Windows 7, 8, and 10 but don't know about the earlier versions.

Government employees should quit trying to politicize climate science

"Science, not silence," is the battle cry for the March for science scheduled for April 22, 2017. The problem is that their silence is what is distorting an understanding of important science issues.

That issue would be global warming, or climate change, as it's now called. Seems that a whistle blower blew the whistle on an influential NOAA paper last year. See Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data. Excerpt:

The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.

But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data.

Meanwhile, March for science founders say this:

Mischaracterization of science as a partisan issue, which has given policymakers permission to reject overwhelming evidence, is a critical and urgent matter. It is time for people who support scientific research and evidence-based policies to take a public stand and be counted.

Good advice. At least they didn't call skeptics names. But it would have been better if they called for honest reporting of their research.

John Podesta provided us with an opportunity to learn how to avoid getting hacked

Boy, did he pay a price! But it's a learning opportunity for us.

Apparently John Podesta had his email hacked, and as a result some emails that proved very embarrassing to Hillary Clinton and her campaign became public knowledge. The best I can determine is that he opened a phishing email, then opened an attachment containing malware. Big mistake.

Peter Mackenzie at Sophos.com provided a helpful lesson on how to avoid that outcome at Why you should be cautious of emails from friends or colleagues. He used a real life example with a bogus email that purportedly came from his solicitor.

It worked this way. A hacker hijacked his lawyer's email address and sent phishing emails to Mr. Mackenzie and maybe other clients. The email contained what looked like a legitimate attachment, e.g., a contract for the client's approval. He rolled his cursor over the attachment link and found something suggesting it wasn't what it seemed. The pdf had an additional suffix: pdf.htm. Clicking on that led him to a link for a fake Gmail login page, but it didn't really go to a website, it was code included in the HTM file. If he had entered his login information it would have been forwarded to the hacker which would have given the hacker access to his email account.

The important take-away from this is to be especially wary of any pdf with an additional suffix, e.g., pdf.htm.

Read the whole thing and you'll be more knowledgeable than Hillary Clinton's most trusted adviser.

5,300 fired at Wells Fargo -- now that was one huge scheme

The news that an employee of a big bank cooked up a plan to swindle money from bank customers wouldn't be that shocking. Maybe there was even a co-conspirator or two. But the revelation that there may have been 5,300 employees in on it is shocking.

The scheme itself looked pretty simple -- as outlined in Wells Fargo fined $185M for fake accounts; 5,300 were fired. Excerpt:

An analysis by the San Francisco-headquartered bank found that its employees opened more than two million deposit and credit card accounts that may not have been authorized by consumers, the officials said. Many of the transfers ran up fees or other charges for the customers, even as they helped employees make incentive goals.

Here's the sad part. Government entities will rake in $185 million in fines which will probably be spent wisely, you think? As for the customers, this:

Accounts refunded represented a fraction of one percent of the accounts reviewed, and refunds averaged $25, Wells Fargo said.

Oh yeah, take that straight to the bank!

Where are the personal stories of people helped by the Clinton charities?

The main stream media love the personal stories. Their news items start with them -- it must be in that famous style book we keep hearing about.

Flip the channels often enough and you hear a talking head on the Clinton side proclaiming that millions of people have benefited from the Clinton Foundation.

We've asked this question before. If the Clinton charities have been so beneficial, where are the stories?

There has to be at least one. Where is it?

Bill Clinton earned millions as honorary chairman of Sharia teaching company

Sharia law is mostly known for its incompatibility with the constitutional form of government practiced in the U.S.A. There's also that nasty part about the low place of women in a Sharia society, and the men's right to beat them, etc.

We've heard about the millions of dollars the Clintons raked in after they left the white house.

So it probably shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that he earned a boatload of money for himself and the Clinton Foundation from a company with a network of schools that teach Sharia law. See Bill Clinton Received Millions From Sharia Law Teaching Firm:

Former President Bill Clinton received $5.6 million in fees from a Dubai-based firm that teaches Sharia law through a network of more than 100 schools worldwide.

Clinton served as the honorary chairman of the company GEMS Education from 2011 to 2014, the Daily Caller reported this week, citing Clinton’s federal tax returns.

GEMS Education teaches Sharia law in over 100 schools around the world, including in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. One of the company’s schools, located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, taught 1,600 students in 2013. Saudi Arabia is known for enforcing Wahhabism, a fundamentalist view of Islam that strictly adheres to Sharia law.

But Bill Clinton, we were told, has a remarkable ability to compartmentalize.

Scammers pretending to be IRS agents are now kinder, gentler

We've all gotten them. It's a robo call from someone purporting to be an IRS agent informing you that you've got a tax problem which is about to become a legal nightmare if you don't call another phone number right now. It's a scam, but apparently it's profitable. Or at least it was, because they've changed tactics. Now they politely inform you that they just need to verify a few details, such as your Social Security number, bank account number or credit card number. It's still a scam. See Consumer Alert: Scammers Change Tactics, Once Again.

Don't call the cops -- there's nothing they can do, and the IRS is notoriously uncooperative with local police. Here's what the IRS alert says to do:

If you get a phone call from someone claiming to be from the IRS and asking for money or to verify your identity, here’s what you should do:

If you don’t owe taxes, or have no reason to think that you do:

Do not give out any information. Hang up immediately.

Contact TIGTA to report the call. Use their IRS Impersonation Scam Reporting web page. You can also call 800-366-4484.

Report it to the Federal Trade Commission. Use the FTC Complaint Assistant on FTC.gov. Please add “IRS Telephone Scam” in the notes.

I suppose I should include this part.

If you know you owe, or think you may owe tax:

Call the IRS at 800-829-1040. IRS workers can help you.

By now you're probably thinking that the IRS is merely collecting for a scam, too, with the exception that they've got the power to ruin us if we don't pay. Yeah, I know. But until we get a flat tax or at least some honest to goodness tax reform then we're stuck with it.

We'd like to believe you would leave, Al Sharpton, but you left too much wiggle room

Here's the quote from Al Sharpton might 'get out of here' if Trump wins:

"If Donald Trump is the nominee, I'm open to support anyone [else], while I'm also reserving my ticket to get out of here if he wins, only because he'd probably have me deported anyway," Sharpton told attendees, who responded in laughter.

First off, there's no evidence Trump would or could deport Sharpton. So there's his first way out of this empty promise. With no threat, there would be no reason to act. Secondly, all he said was that he would buy a ticket. That's not the same thing as actually getting on the bus.

So as much as we would like to believe the reverend Al Sharpton would leave if Trump is the nominee, his statement isn't much evidence of real intent. Never mind that Sharpton's record for honesty is not that high anyway.

Editor's note: Sharpton is probably no more reliable than all those celebrities who promised to leave if George W. Bush got elected. Robo-ed.

Apparently Hillary's aids thought "delete" meant "erase"

Most computer users have known since the days of the floppy disk that hitting the delete key doesn't make information on a storage device disappear but merely removes the document name from the content list and allows the user to reuse that space for something else. If the space wasn't overwritten, it was still there.

Apparently Hillary Clinton's aids didn't know that. Washingtonexaminer.com tells us this: Report: FBI said finding deleted Clinton emails 'not very hard'.

Platte River Networks, the technology company that has managed Clinton's server since 2013, said the server was unlikely to contain any useful data after it handed the device over to FBI investigators in August.

But computer experts with the law enforcement agency were able to pull copies of the deleted emails off the server with relative ease, according to a report by the New York Times.

Although the number of personal emails recovered was not immediately clear, the report said FBI investigators could access deleted emails because Clinton's aides may have only made a cursory attempt to purge the records.

In this instance we should probably be grateful for incompetence. Unfortunately, foreign sources have probably taken advantage of it, too. Furthermore, with the increasingly bad news about the hacks on OPM we might be justified in thinking that incompetence is widespread in the government.

John Kerry -- It was not disturbing before it was very disturbing

Now he tells us. From Reuters:

DUBAI (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said a speech by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Saturday vowing to defy American policies in the region despite a deal with world powers over Tehran's nuclear program was "very disturbing".

"I don't know how to interpret it at this point in time, except to take it at face value, that that's his policy," he said in the interview with Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television, parts of which the network quoted on Tuesday.

"But I do know that often comments are made publicly and things can evolve that are different. If it is the policy, it's very disturbing, it's very troubling," he added.

The administration should be having some buyer's remorse right about now. But what difference at this point does it make?

Why would hackers want government personnel records?

Seems like everything in confidential files eventually ends up on hackers' hard drives. Why do they want all that information? Recently it was the IRS who fessed up to a loss of taxpayer data. Now it's the U.S. Office of Personnel Management's turn. Here's their news release. (See below for some useful tips from there.)

What will hackers do with all that information? Jeremy Wagstaff speculates for Reuters in Medical data, cybercriminals' holy grail, now espionage target. Excerpt:

Whoever was behind the latest theft of personal data from U.S. government computers, they appear to be following a new trend set by cybercriminals: targeting increasingly valuable medical records and personnel files.

This data, experts say, is worth a lot more to cybercriminals than, say, credit card information. And the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) breach revealed on Thursday suggests cyberspies may now also be finding value in it.

Credit card information is so easily obtainable on the black market that it isn't worth much these days, he says. But medical records are a different matter. Apparently, a person's medical records can gain access to drugs and medical devices at the expense of someone else.

The OPM news release focuses on something more likely, the possibility of future spear phishing expeditions to get further infiltrated into government computers. Here's their tip sheet:

Be suspicious of unsolicited phone calls, visits, or email messages from individuals asking about employees or other internal information. If an unknown individual claims to be from a legitimate organization, try to verify his or her identity directly with the company.

Do not provide personal information or information about your organization, including its structure or networks, unless you are certain of a person’s authority to have the information.

Do not reveal personal or financial information in email, and do not respond to email solicitations for this information. This includes following links sent in email.

Do not send sensitive information over the Internet before checking a website’s security (for more information, see Protecting Your Privacy, http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/tips/ST04-013).

Pay attention to the URL of a website. Malicious websites may look identical to a legitimate site, but the URL may use a variation in spelling or a different domain (e.g., .com vs. .net).

If you are unsure whether an email request is legitimate, try to verify it by contacting the company directly. Do not use contact information provided on a website connected to the request; instead, check previous statements for contact information. Information about known phishing attacks is also available online from groups such as the Anti-Phishing Working Group (http://www.antiphishing.org).

Install and maintain anti-virus software, firewalls, and email filters to reduce some of this traffic (for more information, see Understanding Firewalls, http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/tips/ST04-004; Understanding Anti-Virus Software, http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/tips/ST04-005; and Reducing Spam, http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/tips/ST04-007).

Take advantage of any anti-phishing features offered by your email client and web browser.

Employees should take steps to monitor their personally identifiable information and report any suspected instances of identity theft to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov.

Looks like good advice.

Soviet propaganda techniques for domestic politicians

Victor Volsky penned an article at Americanthinker.com titled What's behind Putin's 86% Approval Rating in which he describes some of the old Soviet propaganda techniques that he believes Putin is using today to achieve his popularity.

Closer to home, when we look at how some political parties operate it becomes obvious that some of these techniques are in use by U.S. politicians, too.

Here's a short summary of the processes Mr. Volsky lays out and how some are used domestically.

1. Rotten fish -- This one involves a false accusation of some bad act. Some will believe it, and some will defend the accused. However, the "rotten fish" is smeared all over that person, and whenever his/her name arises so does the memory of the alleged crime. Harry Reid attempted this with his false accusations of tax impropriety against Mitt Romney in 2012.

2. 40-60 -- This was a Joseph Goebbels invention and involves a media outlet which pretends to be neutral by putting out information that favors the opposition to establish credibility. Once it gains trust, then 40% is used to spread disinformation. Distrust for the media is high in the U.S. already. But we would seem to be ripe for this technique as most people search for media producing content with which they agree.

3. Big Lie -- From Mr. Volsky: "The essence of the Big Lie is to propound, with the utmost degree of confidence, a lie so huge and terrible as to become believable – people simply refuse to believe that anyone can lie so blatantly. ... A case in point is the highlight of the Russian TV’s Big Lie hit parade: the “report” that the Ukrainians crucified a three-year-old child on the door of his house.  The deep emotional wound inflicted by such a message renders the recipient impervious to any logical proof to the contrary." Maybe I'm naive, but I don't believe we've seen domestic politicians do that yet.

4. Absolute obviousness -- Here we have the band wagon effect of people wanting to be on the right side of an issue. The global warming movement has made good use of this with the false insistence that there is a consensus among scientists.

It pays to be paranoid.

Faked gay marriage survey -- like counterfeit bills, you know there are more out there

By now everyone has everyone has heard about the survey the gay UCLA PhD published which purported to demonstrate that contact with a gay canvasser can change people's opinions about gay marriage. The survey was later shown to be bogus. They've created another fissure in the credibility of social scientists and the journalists who aid and abet that mendacity.

Daniel J. Flynn in What the Faked Gay Marriage Study Says About Academia and the Media says this:

Ultimately, the fraudulent peer-reviewed study says more about the corruption of the media and academia than it does about the corruption of one activist professor. Journalists and professors ostensibly dedicated to the search for truth unravel the institutions they serve when they imagine themselves as already possessing the truth.

The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and other leading publications initially ran uncritical pieces on the research. Princeton hired Michael LaCour, the UCLA Ph.D. allegedly responsible for the faked data, as an assistant professor and Science published his co-authored article.

We needn't look any farther than the global warming movement to see examples of science subjugated by ideology with willing media accomplices.

It's a little bit like counterfeit money. If a fake twenty dollar bill shows up at a convenience store, you know there wasn't just one out there.

Store scam in Jersey sounds like something Slippin' Jimmy would do

Here's what the culprit did, according to NJ.com in 1 receipt, 2 shopping carts, nearly $500K in losses for Home Depot.

Prosecutors say it worked like this:
Chalet and his conspirators filled two Home Depot shopping carts with the identical items. They would then purchase the items in the one cart using cash, or a fraudulently obtained Home Depot store credit card and hide the other cart somewhere in the store.

A few minutes later, they'd return with the receipt for the first cart and retrieve the second cart.

They would then convince a store clerk that they had returned to purchase an additional inexpensive item while convincing them that they had a valid receipt for the items in the cart.

Maybe that's why some stores put stickers on purchased items that are to big to be bagged.

Oh, in case anyone doesn't know who Slippin' Jimmy is, here's a wiki for Saul Goodman, AKA Jimmy McGill and Slippin' Jimmy, the fictional character from "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul." In his early years as Slippin' Jimmy he practiced the low level con job before he upped his game to practice law.

The dog that didn't bark -- if Harry Reid doesn't sue the equipment manufacturer in his eye injury case we'll know his story was fishy

Plaintiffs' lawyers are big Democrat party donors. And elected Democrats return the favor with laws favoring big lawsuits and big judgments.

And we know that Democrats love to sue. Remember Dennis Kucinich's olive-pit-in-the-sandwich injury? His reaction: Sue the bastards!

So when a big time Democrat gets injured by faulty equipment you just know that personal injury lawyers will be hammering down his door to get the case.

Harry Reid's eye injury story is coming under scrutiny, But we've got a "tell" to watch for. If Reid doesn't sue or settle with the equipment manufacturer then we've got a pretty good clue that the equipment didn't cause the injury.

Listen for the dog to bark.

Charles Manson's fiancee wanted to marry him so she could get rich from his fans wanting to view his body after he died

We all love a good entrepreneurial story, but this one takes the cake. Apparently, the lady who wants to marry Charles Manson was in it for the money. According to the New York Post, she and a pal originally wanted Manson to agree to let them have his body after he died so that they could put it on display and charge visitors for viewing it. Now there's a tourist destination sure to rival Disneyland.

But Charlie declined. Plan B: marry him so she could get the body under state law. That one is still hanging out there.