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I guess the "forgotten" and "didn't think about it" part can't be underestimated. I work from coworking spaces and coffee shops in Asia. People do dev work and

I guess the "forgotten" and "didn't think about it" part can't be underestimated. I work from coworking spaces and coffee shops in Asia. People do dev work and business related tasks from these places. The devs spin up servers and have databases with standard passwords exposed on the network. Sometimes they might have client or company data dumped into the DB's to work with. It's scary.

jasonjei 12y ago
I agree with the above post--I can't even count all the times I've seen people bring in a corporate laptop (complete with an asset tag and call if lost sticker--that's just begging for theft attention) at a public coffee house left unattended. If you are going to bother using a VPN 2-factor token and privacy screen, please keep your laptop in your custody and view at all times. Ideally, work from a private executive or home office if you're a remote worker, or on-site at the company. If you must work at a coffee shop, please be sure you don't have PII easily accessible or valuable financial data waiting to be pried (that includes being on a VPN that can potentially have access to such data).
- heyalexej 12y ago
  re: "asset tag and call if lost sticker". I think it's also a great idea to not have your user and hostname set to be "johnbigbucks@bestinvestconsulting" but something more generic or randomized. I use something like this to randomize my hostname. awk 'length==6' /usr/share/dict/words | grep -v '[^[:alpha:]]' | shuf -n 1 | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
  - philsnow 12y ago
    because i'm somehow compelled to golf such things (like unnecessary use of cat): egrep '^[[:alpha:]]{6}$' /usr/share/dict/words | shuf -n 1 | tr A-Z a-z
    - heyalexej 12y ago
      Yep, that's elegant. It's so easy to write bad bash scripts that I do it all the time. So much to learn on my end.
      - philsnow 12y ago
        Thanks for your post btw, I did not know about this tool `shuf`. My equivalent involves `sort -r | head -1`

jasonjei 12y ago

I agree with the above post--I can't even count all the times I've seen people bring in a corporate laptop (complete with an asset tag and call if lost sticker--that's just begging for theft attention) at a public coffee house left unattended. If you are going to bother using a VPN 2-factor token and privacy screen, please keep your laptop in your custody and view at all times. Ideally, work from a private executive or home office if you're a remote worker, or on-site at the company. If you must work at a coffee shop, please be sure you don't have PII easily accessible or valuable financial data waiting to be pried (that includes being on a VPN that can potentially have access to such data).

heyalexej 12y ago
re: "asset tag and call if lost sticker". I think it's also a great idea to not have your user and hostname set to be "johnbigbucks@bestinvestconsulting" but something more generic or randomized. I use something like this to randomize my hostname. awk 'length==6' /usr/share/dict/words | grep -v '[^[:alpha:]]' | shuf -n 1 | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
- philsnow 12y ago
  because i'm somehow compelled to golf such things (like unnecessary use of cat): egrep '^[[:alpha:]]{6}$' /usr/share/dict/words | shuf -n 1 | tr A-Z a-z
  - heyalexej 12y ago
    Yep, that's elegant. It's so easy to write bad bash scripts that I do it all the time. So much to learn on my end.
    - philsnow 12y ago
      Thanks for your post btw, I did not know about this tool `shuf`. My equivalent involves `sort -r | head -1`