Personal Identification Disclosure

So I have been looking to rent a new place as I moved back to the DC metro area. What I have found is an exuberant amount of people that are asking for a ridiculous amount of personal information. They are asking for SSN, checks which would obviously include account and routing information, and I even had one person asking to set up the ability for them to auto charge my account for the monthly rent and yet another asking for a photocopy of 2 picture IDs and my SSN card!

I have probably found myself looking for this stuff more and more lately but I find this outrageous. My general question is; Am I being over paranoid or is it correct of me to deny them these things? It’s bad enough that I need to keep thieves from gaining access to this via my personal space, but now I need to put reliance on these people, which most are arguably ignorant about computer and general security, from getting hacked and exposing my information.

What ways are there to get around this? Obviously I see their side of wanting this information, but they should understand this side as well. Explaining this to them is quite difficult though unless they have been a victim of such a crime. I thought about running the credit checks myself and scrubbing the information and just denying the existence of a personal checking account. Any other suggestions?

SANS 560 anyone?

I was extended an invitation to become a SANS mentor. This means I will be running some classes real soon. I will be starting with offering the 560. This is the class you would take to obtain your GPEN certification. Time and place to be announced soon. If you are interested, drop me a line and let me know. I'll get you on the list. Here is the link of the course and what is included:

SANS 560

I Can't hear you now! :(

You read that correctly. I was unable to get a good test with the bluetooth hacking this weekend. The reason? It appears that when you pass your bluetooth through to a virtual machine on your Mac, you loose a lot of the needed functionality. Yes, yes I know. You are thinking why didn't you just get carwhisperer to work on the Mac or try the Windows route, or boot your Dell into Backtrack?

The truth is that I wanted to see it work this way. I really like the idea of having one laptop that can do everything I need to do with the use of VMWare. Alas, this is not the case yet; at least not without getting external wifi and bluetooth dongles. I will attempt again this weekend with the Dell and Backtrack.

I did find something else interesting though....the PS3 has bluetooth. My goal may be to see what kind of cool stuff I can do there as well.

Can you hear me now?

OK, OK my posting has been a bit spotty. I'm trying :) So anyway why I am posting today.... Can you hear me now? Reminds you of a Verizon commercial. Well, this post has to do with...well cell phones, and bluetooth headsets. You may have all been reading how vulnerable bluetooth is. Do you know just have vulnerable? Check out the following video by Josh Wright:

I Can I hear you now!

So how scary is that? Bet you will think twice about wearing one of those bad boys now :). That got me thinking, those of you that know me you know how that goes! If we can eavesdrop/inject on bluetooth headsets then I bet we can eavesdrop/inject on car bluetooth systems. Well...I hope to test this tomorrow and see. I'm traveling back from PA in the AM and will have a few hours at my disposal. If by some reason I am too tired, it will be done this weekend and I will post my results here. This can have a very scary outcome. Lets hope more thought was put into the car bluetooth setup though...yeah right!