Telstar Logistics reminds me of college

One of the things that I find interesting, is how amongst people, perception often becomes reality – a sort of truthiness if you will. As a result, I find the story of “Telstar Logicistics”  somewhat amusing:

Telstar Logistics: What Is Telstar Logistics?

In the late 1980s, I lived in Providence, Rhode Island, where I drove a 1974 Dodge Tradesman 200 van. One day, I had an epiphany — if I disguised the van to look like a work vehicle, I’d be able to park in yellow-curb zones without getting parking tickets. After a trip to an art-supply store to buy some vinyl lettering, an ambiguous company name was created, the letters were applied to the sides of the van, and indeed, no tickets were received.

The fake company took on a life of its own. In 1987, I bought a new SUV, which was duly accessorized to look like a fleet vehicle, with yellow stripes on the tailgate, a cryptic vehicle number on the sides, and a police-style spotlight.

 This vehicle served me well throughout the 1990s, and I’m pretty confident that the commercial camouflage did much to help deter theft and vandalism while parked on the gritty streets of San Francisco’s Mission District.

That’s classic. Do enough of the right things, and people will believe who you say you are without question. It reminds me of this classic story about a random guy who ended up directing air traffic for over 2 days at a Coast Guard facility in NY.

It also reminds of the job I had in college. Back then, I was working 10-20 hours a week as a network engineer on campus, inspecting the cable plant, doing basic configurations of switches and hubs. As a result, I would often be carrying around a tool bag with cables spewing out of it, a clipboard, and a commercial grade walkie talkie. The walkie talkie was huge and looked just like this one:

It was the same model that the maintenance people, on campus EMS, and others carried. Especially with this radio, I found that I was able to go ask for access to all sorts of doors (that I needed legitimate access to) without question. In the dorms, some students would look through the peephole after I knocked, see the clipboard and the radio, and just let me in – without asking any questions.

A friend of mine caught onto this, and occasionally in the evenings, he would bust out his clipboard, and declare himself “Lobby Monitor” and ask all the people lounging in the lobby to sign in. And people would comply! (It probably helped that he was pretty tall too.)

I often think about these things when I look into trying to improve the phishing and social hacking problems that have become a common attack vector.

A tough problem to solve.