Today was odd. I woke to a wonderfully unseasonably warm day that eventually spiraled into a dreary rainy one. Much in the same vein as the oddity that developed online today. This morning while perusing my Twitter feed and reading email I received an email from a reader.
The email made my brain cramp almost instantly. I give you a passage from the strange tale of a virus called SQL injection.
Wait What?
No really. This was a passage from a post that appeared on Infosec Island this morning.
A SQL injection is a virus or bug that effects an application that is not properly coded or secured. There are many different configurations of various software used to build and run a website. An example would be the common Word Press blog platform that many use and has been found to be vulnerable. This is just one of hundreds of applications that can be hacked in this way.
I reached for the Advil but, by this point the damage was already done. The capillaries around my eyes had ruptured from the petechial hemorrhage that I suffered as a result of a high velocity facepalm.
The twitterverse erupted in short order at the high grade derp that had been discovered. I can understand a mistake or someone that was new at this making an error. That happens. We were all new once. In this case however, not so much.
The author, Robert Siciliano, is the CEO of IDTheftSecurity.com and multiple other things including, apparently being a “Spokesperson” for McAfee.
He claimed this was an error that was made by his admin and that this article was never meant to be published at all.
Well…look what the Twitterverse found.
The exact article that apparently his “admin” had put up in error this morning. Um, to quote attrition.org “we’re calling bs”. You’ll note the date of the post that was put up was at least three years before the exact mirror image of the post this morning.
How does this admin keep their job?
The story then twisted in further odd directions. More and more articles ostensibly written by Robert Siciliano were unearthed.
Example,
Only to be deleted in what appeared to be feverish damage control on the part of Mr. Siciliano shortly afterwards.
Thanks to the numerous folks on Twitter today that did so much research.
If it wasn’t for so much thrashing this most likely would have gone away after a few chuckles. That being said, I’ll leave it to you the reader to draw your own conclusions.
(Image used under CC from JD Hancock)