This Is the Best Selection of Strange Security Stories We’ve Ever Seen

Nobody likes to hear about how the sausage is made, especially when it’s not particularly interesting. Well, I’m going to give a brief account of how the Strange Security sausage is made anyway. The Security Management editorial team and I have a long-running chat where we share security-related news with each other. And when the news is strange, we highlight it.

We then put the strange ones in a spreadsheet and score them across several variables like “bizarreness” and “impact on corporate security,” take the average and… nah, none of that happens. Once the stories have been highlighted in the chat, I just choose the five I think are funny or most strange/weird/etc., and then put in up to five overflow articles that nearly made the cut.

April, however, nearly broke the system. I could have had an all-animal edition. Or an all-1% edition consisting of stories dealing with wealth. I could have had two full months-worth of top five stories and been very happy with the results. Heck, one strange story, about smuggling ants even had follow-ups in several news outlets—and that story not only didn’t make the top five, it didn’t even make the overflow list! Anyway, my cup runneth over this month. 

As usual, we understand security is serious business, and while these stories are treated with a lighter touch, we know some of them have victims, and we by no means mean to diminish the harms they endure.

If you’re a cybercriminal going phishing for a European diplomat, what would make good bait? Wine, of course. A group linked to Russia began using the technique last year and has recently renewed it. In the scheme, they masquerade as being from a European country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and send emails to diplomats inviting them to an exclusive wine-tasting event. The email contains links to actual European Ministry of Foreign Affairs website to give the emails a façade of legitimacy. The invitation link, however, downloads malware—last year’s version was dubbed WineLoader and this year’s version is dubbed GrapeLoader.

The original headline says it all: Unsecured penguin caused helicopter crash in South Africa: Folks, if you’re going to fly with a penguin, then please, please, please, secure it first! The penguin in question was in a cardboard box—but don’t worry, images in the story show the box had crudely cut air holes in it. Unfortunately, a passenger just put the box on their lap. It promptly slid off during flight, knocking flight controls and sending the helicopter into a crash landing. No one, including the penguin was hurt, but the official investigation of the incident was spot-on with its security terminology, noting “the lack of secure containment of the penguin” and that the pilot’s “risk assessment” did not include transport of the animal.

A guy makes up a country, claims to be the religious ruler of the made up country, and enters into 1,000-year lease agreements with indigenous peoples: What? Is there something wrong with that? It turns out the country of Bolivia, which includes nearly eight percent of the Amazon rainforest and includes several groups of indigenous peoples, does, in fact, frown on the practice. Bolivia deported the leader of the “United States of Kailasa.” A warning: This strange story has dark undertones since the leader left India after accusations of rape, torture, and child abuse.

Tractor-trailer accident spills $800,000 of dimes on highway: For those of you who have trouble doing math in your head, that’s eight million dimes. I can’t improve upon Adeel Hassan’s lede in his New York Times article: “The scene looked as if a giant piggy bank had been split open, its loose change scattering and forming a metallic sea.” And there’s this quote from the local mayor: “The funniest part to me was that they picked up the dimes using the vacuum trucks that are used to suck out sewage and water and stuff like that.” That’s just some good writing and reporting from the paper of record.

When it’s bat boy vs. drone, bat boy wins: This year, Major League Baseball’s Athletics, formerly of Oakland and headed to Las Vegas, are playing home games in a minor league stadium in Sacramento, California. At their first game, an unwelcome visitor appeared in left field, and play stopped as the drone hovered a few feet above the field. And, well, I’ll let the bat boy, Stewart Thalblum, explain it: “Everybody was just looking at it for a little while and I’ve never had something like that happen. I was asking around, everybody’s looking and nobody from security or anything had gone out there so I was like, I don’t know whose responsibility it is, so I was like, OK, maybe it’s mine.” He walked over, carefully grabbed its underside working to avoid the blades, and beat it with a bat. I know ASIS has several sports team CSOs as members, so take note in case you need Thalblum's services.

And here are a few more strange stories that crossed our desks in the past month:

Runaway kangaroo’s hop down Alabama highway causes two-vehicle crash (Sidenote: Any other month, this might have been the top story, if for no other reason than the mesmerizing video of the kangaroo hopping on down the side of an interstate.)

A man airlifted from Japan’s Mount Fuji returns to the slope days later and is rescued again (Sidenote: When the man went back a third time to look for his keys, rescue left him. I’m kidding, I’m kidding! Kinda sorta.)

The landscape is centuries old. The crime is more modern. (Sidenote: Farm crime. Don’t see too many farm crime stories.)

CEO choked man who danced barefoot on cruise ship, US says (Sidenote: Come on, how does this story not make the top five? You tell me, which story should it replace?)

Con artists scamming London tourists meet their match: Batman and Robin (Sidenote: It was incredibly tough not to make room for this in the top five, because then I could have setup the bat boy story with a Batman story—opportunity lost when the strange security stories are this strange and this good. See you next month!)