HACKERS INFILTRATED TESLA’S AMAZON CLOUD ACCOUNT TO MINE CRYPTOCURRENCY

the noise? A simple hole will do much better. I cut holes for fans in all my cases so fans can work. Same for PSU bottom mounts that have screens.

–Don Hoffman

EXECUTIVE EDITOR ALAN DEXTER RESPONDS: It’s a blatant exaggeration to say that grills can restrict more than 70 percent of the airflow (we’d suggest less than 10 percent for most designs), but you have a point when it comes to adding to fan noise and stopping them working optimally. We’ve just had a quick look around the office, and there are a lot of “normal” machines that have designs that do indeed appear to hinder airflow, rather than promote it.

Your solution of cutting holes where your fans go has some merit, especially from the perspective of keeping your noise levels down and improving airflow. There is one obvious problem with drilling/ cutting out all of your grills to improve airflow in that little fingers now have nothing to stop them prodding into our beloved machines (causing damage either to said fingers, or the fan blades). If you are going to remove all the grills, but do have little ones to bear in mind, wire grills can help protect your system and have the least effect on both fan noise and performance.

More of a Difference

Just found this magazine a year ago, and I love it so much. I end up building PCs on a semi- regular basis, since my parents are engineers and my brother and I are college students, and I’m the only PC enthusiast in the house. Anyway, my default source for product reviews when speccing a new system is your magazine, because unlike reading online customer reviews, I can expect a lot more content than just jokes about graphic Tesla is the latest victim of what’s known as cryptojacking, which is when a company is hacked and its resources used to mine cryptocurrency. In this case, hackers were able to break into Tesla’s Amazon cloud account.

Cybersecurity startup RedLock Cloud Security Intelligence (yes, that would be CSI) discovered the intrusion last month. Or, more accurately, it stumbled upon the intrusion while investigating Kubernetes administration consoles being accessible over the Internet due to a lack of password protection. These consoles are designed to help IT admins manage virtual machines.

“A couple of the instances belonged to Aviva, a British multinational insurance company, and Gemalto, the world’s largest manufacturer of SIM cards. Within these consoles, access credentials to these organizations’ Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure environments were exposed. Upon further investigation, the team determined that hackers had secretly infiltrated these organizations’ public cloud environments and were using the compute instances to mine cryptocurrencies,” RedLock said.

Read the full article at http://bit.ly/2EJ2PPd cards running Minesweeper at one billion FPS.

What I want to ask is: Would it be possible to get a greater quantity and diversity of reviews? I love that the magazine already has an awesome diversity of budgets considered— if a Pentium or i3 is the cream of the crop, you aren’t afraid to say so. But I’d like to see a bit more diversity— gamer components suit most of my purposes just fine, but I’d love to see reviews of things like NASes, Nvidia Quadros, the Titan V, pre- built HP and Dell workstations, tablets, high- quality soundcards, and musician- quality (not “gamer”) headphones. Just being nit- picky, though. This magazine is awesome!

– Kieran Al

EXECUTIVE EDITOR ALAN DEXTER RESPONDS: It’s good to hear you are enjoying the magazine, and that we’ve become a trusty companion to your builds. As for expanding our remit, we’ve actually covered some of these items already (in fact, you’ll find a review of the Titan V this issue, on page 76), although others we steer clear of simply because a generalized review isn’t particularly useful. How one person uses a professional graphics card is often completely different to how another does, and a more general review wouldn’t necessarily be useful to our readers.

Be Specific

I read the article about setting up the Raspberry Pi with Kismet in the March 2018 issue of Maximum PC. In the beginning of the article, you talk about the need for a monitor mode enabled Wi- Fi adapter, but it says “TP-Link TL-WN72N” in the text— I guess you are referring to the TP- Link TL-WN727N adapter that is pictured in Image B within the article.

One more thing that is crucial to know is what version of the TL-WN727N adapter you were using. The risk is that readers want to follow your example setup (since it is the easiest way to get started) and just buy a TL-WN727N. However, the chipset is not the same in many models of Wi-Fi adapters, even though the model name remains the same over versions. The TL-WN727N, for example, has at least three different chipsets, depending on the version at hand. The v1 has a Ralink RT3070 chipset, v3 has a Ralink RT5370 chipset, and the v4 has the MediaTek MT7601U chipset (some v4s have the Realtek RTL8188EUS chipset). I’m not all sure that all those chipsets a) work out of the box with Raspbian Lite or b) can offer monitor mode. It could be good to know so that readers don’t rush and buy adapters that they think should work, but won’t.

I am very aware of the fact that you are just suggesting examples of equipment to get started, but for this kind of “war driving” scenario, it would also be good to use a Wi- Fi adapter that has an external antenna, for range reasons.

– Jonas

EXECUTIVE EDITOR ALAN DEXTER RESPONDS: We’ve seen wildly different hardware branded with the same name before, so while we’re not surprised that there are so many versions of the TL-WN727N, it’s still annoying. You actually want to make sure that you get the original v1 spin of the TL-WN727N, which uses the Ralink RT3070 chipset. The main point remains, though, that you’ve got to make sure it supports monitor mode when buying it, whichever dongle you get.