Stone martens

Image: Pixabay

Not only nice people live in our neighborhood. There is also a stone marten. And do you know what that little creature is particularly fond of? The wiring and hoses in cars. Years ago, the windshield-washer fluid line in our car was chewed through. Recently, the neighbor’s car suffered gnawed cables as well. Once that was repaired, the marten struck again. The same car.

Children and teenagers do not like walking through our street. That is because almost every house has a device that emits a high-pitched beep as soon as it detects movement. It also fires off flashes of light. Apparently, stone martens do not like that. And young people, who have a wider acoustic frequency range, are not fond of it either (with some devices I can actually hear it myself).

There are more defensive strategies. Under our hood there’s a toilet freshener block. The neighbors use a bundle of dog hair. Someone else has placed a piece of wire mesh under the car. And finally, someone even had a kind of electric deterrent installed in the engine compartment. I asked Copilot what it thought of all this. According to it, the mesh and the (harmless) high voltage are reasonably effective, but with other solutions you also need a fair bit of luck. Forget about the scent products. Although: proven in practice, I am inclined to say. Whereupon I must immediately admit that I cannot prove a causal connection between the toilet block and the absence of bite damage.

The stone marten is a predator with a strong territorial drive. It marks its habitat with scent traces. When it encounters the scent of a competitor, it tries to remove it. For example by chewing it away. In addition, those wires have a pleasant smell and likewise a pleasant bite. It is also nice and warm there after a car has been driven, and well sheltered.

No measures had been taken for the car that was attacked twice. That implies that the measures taken by the others do work. Just as burglars are likely to choose the least secured house in a street, the stone marten also opts for a snack that does not require it to pinch its ears or nose. Or where it does not receive electric shocks. That neighbor at least has the luck of driving a leased car. Perhaps that made him more careless than the rest. But still, it causes him quite some hassle.

Yesterday I visited the datacenter of a company where a lot of money is involved. That was evident from the physical security measures. From the outside it looked a bit like a prison. Once inside, my identity was checked and my fingerprint was stored on a badge. The badge hung from a bright red lanyard stating that I was only allowed to walk around when accompanied, and the badge showed the name of my host. With the badge I could pass through a single-person airlock deeper into the building: the outer door opens, you step in, the door closes, you present your badge and your finger and if everything checks out, the inner door opens. But first you still had to pass through a detection gate (which of course triggered on my belt) and my belongings went through a scanner.

The nature of my visit meant that we also went up onto the roof. At the door to the roof, my host first had to inform security, because obviously that door was secured. Not only with a badge reader, but also with a door-open status detector – hence that phone call. Once on the roof, I saw how a swiveling camera was keeping a close eye on us. Once back inside, my host had to sign us out.

There was an impressive number of screens in the security control room, connected to an even more impressive number of cameras. Of course the guards cannot possibly watch them all constantly, but the systems alert them with a beep when they detect something out of the ordinary. From the sound of the beep, the guards know where to look.

Our neighbor has granted me access to the security camera footage at the front of his house. Two see more than one, he must have thought. Moreover, his camera captures our front garden rather generously. It also immediately provided an innocent opening to ask what the camera at the back of his house sees. Our backyard is neatly out of view. As it should be, because there we value privacy more than security provided by a third party.

And so everyone – at least everyone who gives it a thought – adjusts their security to their own needs. I just hope we do not end up in an arms race with that marten.

There will be no Security (b)log next week.

 

And in the big bad world…

• this data theft comes with a smell.
• other countries are struggling with the theft of high-value data, too.
• Microsoft says MS Teams is increasingly being used in ‘Hello, this is the helpdesk’ attacks.
• this international report explains how to defend yourself against covert Chinese networks that make use of your equipment.
• even that innocent snipping tool turns out to offer opportunities to attackers.
• ransomware criminals are arming themselves against the quantum computer, too.
• AES-128 turns out to be perfectly safe from the quantum computer.
• a ransomware negotiator passed information to the opposing side.
• quite a few governments worldwide have access to ‘exclusive’ spyware.
• Apple is fighting grabby law-enforcement agencies — and in the same time, all other curious parties.