Bet you didn’t know Microsoft was enabling an invasion of your privacy by making your computer less secure. Aside from their usual, sloppy coding, of course.
Hackers have released an application designed to thwart a Microsoft-packaged forensic toolkit used by law enforcement agencies to examine a suspect’s hard drive during a raid.
The hacker tool, dubbed Decaf, is designed to counteract the Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, aka Cofee. The latter is a suite of 150 bundled, off-the-shelf forensic tools that run from a script. Microsoft combined the programs into a portable tool that can be used by law enforcement agents in the field before they bring a computer back to their forensic lab. The script runs on a USB stick that agents plug into the machine.
The tools scan files and gather information about activities performed on the machine, such as where the user surfed on the internet or what files were downloaded.
Welcome to the Police States of Amerika. Luckily, there are still some hackers out there who are on the ball.
I wonder if having this on your computer will automatically make you suspect by the police/border patrol?
So glad to be on a Mac!
Now with automatic Global Climate Change adjustments to the data, if trends are to have meaning.
This story is old (and misleading).
If the cops have physical access to your machine then you’re fucked. They can get to your data with or without the toolkit. Any reasonably smart IT person can reset a Windows password.
While I think this was a dumb move of Microsoft’s part from a PR standpoint it’s not like they gave them anything they don’t already have. It’s not a super-secret backdoor into your system.
Encrypt your porn/sensitive data/whatever. It’s easy, and it’s the only way to be safe.
#2 Of course it does. You have a computer, you are automatically suspect. You must be using the computer to steal videos or music.
Wasn’t there a big stink a number of years ago over how Intel & AMD were complying with government requests to provide a way for law enforcement to backdoor into your system? This happened around the same time people griped about the Pentium III serial number fiasco. When people got into an uproar over this and Echelon & Carnivore, it got quiet rather quickly on the matter of the CPUs being potentially modified. This was around the same time law enforcement wanted a master key for PGP.
Combine that with AT&T being the backbone for almost all Internet traffic in this country and then seems don’t sound so outlandish.
DCSNet: http://tinyurl.com/2v5zz7
Carnivore: http://tinyurl.com/b4wca
Echelon: http://tinyurl.com/566hl
All the stuff that microsoft bundles in there for this purpose has been hacked and you can download it in it’s entirety to your pc and put it on your own USB drive so you can spy on others. Read about it about a month ago.
But I want the police to catch people who look at child porn, or are terrorists…
@Postman
That is sort of like letting the fox guard the hen house.
That took a month. *grin*
#3 – Thats right. Keep living in your little dreamworld under the mistaken belief that your computer is secure. Last time I checked OSX could be compromised in mere seconds.
But I want the police to catch people who look at child porn, or are terrorists…
I want the police to catch people who cheat on their taxes. How about I want to catch people who are guilty of sedition against the US?
Ok, I really want the police to catch people who complain about the president of the US in a threatening way. We should read everybody’s emails to make sure there’s nothing “funny” in there.
Wow, I’ve barely gotten started. Lets see how big we can make this list of things that we think the GOVERNMENT SHOULD DO EVERYTHING IT COULD TO PREVENT. Wheeeeee.
Naturally the whole process should be conducted in absolute secrecy (just in case they “catch” somebody who is powerful and might be embarassed… can’t have that happening.)
So glad I switched to Apple a couple of years ago.
I’m all for putting a stop to pictures like this.
A bootable version of Puppy Linux on a hardware encrypted 4GB thumb drive, with a secure VPN and Open DNS.
TrueCrypt with a 20 character password (numbers, letters, specials, case sensitive). Simple enough.
#17 Michael
TrueCrypt is a truly fine piece of software. Much better than most commercial products.
How is this different from linux distrobutions such as CAINE, Backtrack and SystemRescueCD? I use those distros to recover data, passwords and fix other problems. With these distros, it does matter if the target machine runs Windows, MacOS or Unix (linux, BSD).
Secure your privacy with encyption.
#12 Zybch
Safari, Firefox, and IE8 were all hacked through the same flaw. 2 out of 3 have been patched. I wonder which one hasn’t been patched?