Outbox.. have you heard???

Outbox apparently is a "novel" service in the US. It is refereed as a "disruptive innovation". Basically, their innovation is that they will open the mail that it was post to you (read it maybe), scan it, and email it to you.
Effectively, the idea behind this is to have your mail delivered to you through email, wherever you are. Of course there is a monthly fee that you need to pay in order to use this service.
There is a huge debate between the founders of Outbox and the postal service in the US regarding this "disruption of the postal service". The following article summarises pretty well the views from both sides [1] and give you a nice inside on what is going on.

This blog post is about the security/privacy of the contents of the postal mail, by also taking under consideration is it is ethical as well, looking into the recipient's and the sender's perspective. It is not intended to discuss/debate if the Outbox idea is an innovation or a disruption of the postal service.

Electromagnetic Field 2014 - EMF Camp

Electromagnetic Field [1] is a UK camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers.

This is actually the first day out here for this year (Fri 29th - Sun 31st Aug 2014). It is a lovely site with power to your tent (if you remembered to bring an extension) and Wi-Fi. Tickets are approximately £100 and if you are thinking of driving down, you need to purchase in advance a parking ticket for £15. 

As a side note; as it is not clear on the website, the parking area is a field. Also, to get there you will have to drive through mud, dirt, grass and about 500 yards of rocks which seem pretty sharp. So, be prepared before you decide to drive to EMF. I suggest renting a car for the weekend if you don't wanna risk getting your car out here!

UPS Store tills infected by Malware in the US

UPS Store tills in the US are infected by debit and credit-card-reading malware in 51 of its branches. [1] UPS says the security breach may have exposed credit and debit card data at the affected stores between January 20, 2014 and August 11, 2014. As many as 100,000 transactions may have been snooped on, we're told, out of the millions normally running through the UPS network.

US-CERT has been warning about point-of-sale vulnerabilities for some time now. An advisory was released on January regarding Malware Targeting Point of Sale Systems [2]. 

The only way businesses could prevent carder raids is to look into adapting point-to-point encryption (P2PE).

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/20/ups_raises_hands_owns_up_to_hack/
[2] https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA14-002A

Outlook 365 Full Reset

I tried to set up Outlook 365 but I entered the wrong credentials. For some reason, which there is no point investigating further at this stage, I managed to crash Outlook 365. I was stuck with the forever loading splash screen of Outlook. There was no way for me to change the values from that loading interface. On top of that I believe the profile data file was corrupted, so there was no way to start Outlook at this stage. 

So, I had to reset Outlook 365 like it was the first time it was being used:

Black Hat: Hackers execute code on mobile POS devices, play their version of Flappy Bird

Researchers who discovered vulnerabilities in mobile point-of-sale devices (mPOS), which could allow malicious code execution on targeted payment systems, demonstrated their findings at Black Hat 2014 in Las Vegas. 

[1] http://www.scmagazine.com/black-hat-hackers-execute-code-on-mobile-pos-devices-play-their-version-of-flappy-bird/article/365390/