midfr0st was never able to sleep during the day, at least not when the sun was shining. Might as well go out and meet with some friends. midfr0st picked up a packet of cigarettes, a lighter and his none work laptop then headed for his balcony. While the laptop was booting up he lit a smoke. Only eight left, might have to leave the apartment today. He double clicked the World of Warcraft icon and inhaled some smoke while the game was loading.
At 10:15 he bid his friends farewell and closed the lid of his laptop. He was getting more tired but knew he couldn’t sleep. midfr0st had never been able to stand the smell of smoke on his fingers and washed his hands obsessively. Having been outside for a while he couldn’t help noticing the sun shining through his windows, making the dust in his apartment painfully obvious. He would love to hire a maid or cleaner but he didn’t want them to see all his computer equipment and gadgets. I need a robot, he thought dreamingly.
midfr0st powered up all his computers, fans and other things which made noise. When he called the tech support of the antispam company Gantern used, he wanted it to sound like he was in a server room. He picked up a cell phone from his rack and inserted a sim card.
Tech support: “Hello this is Donald how may I help you?”
midfr0st writes down Donald’s name in his notes.
midfr0st: “Hi Donald, I’m calling from Gantern Construction.”
Donald: “Do you have your contract number?”
midfr0st moved closer to the noise.
midfr0st: “What’s that?”
Donald: “Your contract number”
midfr0st: “Contract number haha! That’s a good one! They didn’t even tell me we were using you guys until a couple of days ago. I’ll tell you it’s mayhem down here. The domain we are using is gantern.com. Hold on.”
midfr0st pretended to be arguing to someone in the “server room”.
midfr0st: “Sorry for that.”
Donald: “No problem”
midfr0st: “The domain we are using is gantern.com, can you get it up to your screen?”
Donald: “Hang on… the computer system is very slow today.”
Why do they always say that when your calling support?
Donald: “Here I have it. Are you Richard Burne?”
midfr0st: “Hey, not even my mother calls me Richard. I’m Dick to most people and the e is silent in Burne it’s not Bernie.”
Donald: “Oh, sorry, so what can I do for you Dick?”
midfr0st: “We are changing our infrastructure and will be moving our mail servers. As we have it now you forward all email to mail.gantern.com. What I would need is to change that to an ip address, could you do that?”
Donald: “Ehm, well I guess I could, but why?”
midfr0st: “Time”
Donald: “Time?”
midfr0st: “Yes I want the change to be instantaneous, if I just change the DNS records for mail.gantern.com I have to worry about caching issues. How fast can you do the change?”
Donald: “In minutes but can’t you just lower the…”
midfr0st: “Again time. If it was up to me I would, but you know how it is with management; they tend to live in the past and everything happened yesterday including this conversation. I bet you’ve been there.”
Donald: “Do you want me to change it now?”
midfr0st: “No thanks, I don’t have time to deal with it today. Besides I have to prep the new server first. I’ll call you this time tomorrow. Thanks for your help. Bye!
Donald: “You’re welcome, bye!”
[tags]security, stories, social engineering[/tags]
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