Abuse and Identity Theft

I'd say the dirtiest part of my job is when I have to roll up my sleeves and call the people directly. For the most part, I'd say this is a pretty easy facet of my job because most of the people I talk to are Admins or know, in some way, how their network is using our internet service. Occasionally, I have to talk to people who have almost zero experience using a home PC, much less a pocket calculator and those are always the most memorable.

Today, I spoke with a young woman who maintained an apartment complex rental office...not exactly someone you want to ask if you should format your server with Fat32 or NTFS (in the name of server stability), but she was willing to let me educate her on what I was calling about, so it turned out okay after I ended the call. She patiently listened to me explain everything in metaphoric terms and I was very happy to hear that she understood the situation completely. She wasn't the person I needed to talk with, but she will make the arrangements to have those people talk to me. In the mean time, I killed the compromised machine's ability to reach the internet until her Admin could look at it.

Another abuse issue chalked up as 'solved'...thank you, drive through.

The system had been hacked by an unknown source, but had been configured to have a website hosted on it (without this location even knowing it was happening). Said website looks exactly like the financial institution 'claiming' to need their username/password information for a host of different reasons. Most people don't look at the location of the URL, so they enter their info, and pow...they get their info stolen. It ranks down there with challenging the handicapped kids in your elementary school to a game of dodgeball and stealing from little old ladies in my book. If I ever find out the fuck-faces that run this organization, I'm gonna take one for the team and rid them from the genepool. The activity is commonly known as 'phishing' and is becoming a lot more popular as of late.

My sister, for example, had her Identity stolen recently. Having to get all of her financial records changed was a monumentally (emphasis on the mental) huge pain in her ass. I empathyze with her, but almost wish they had stolen mine.

In other news,

It looks like I"ll be taking the train to San Diego for a day or so to pick up the little girl. She's been with my parents since I left and, of course, enjoying the hell out of herself. Being that she's the ultimate gaming cheerleader, my dad's been spending gobs of time with her at his side while he plays on his new Game Cube. Yes...my dad's got a Game Cube and he also plays World of Warcraft~I still think he's the coolest ever for enjoying the same games as I do.

So the train trip will consist of me traveling for a good 18 hours (collectively) because I don't want my vehicle to endure another trip in the blistering heat of the Central Valley. Another perk to taking the train is that I'll get to drink the whole way down~W00t! The last time I took the train, I had too many Arrogant Bastard Ales and greeted my father (who graciously picked me up at the train station) with a stale ale belch~I love you dad!

At least I will have my daughter with me on the way back up to Concord. She makes for an ideal traveling companion because we can entertain eachother pretty effectively. I think a trip to the book store is in order just to make sure we have something to do just in case one of us gets bored.

Hope you all have a nice, relaxing weekend...I'm going back to work now.