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| Thread ID: 137020 | 2014-05-14 03:14:00 | How to protect your PC with Encryption. | kingdragonfly (309) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 1374956 | 2014-05-14 08:45:00 | You read the links before you posted your reply. Yeah right I did, and when they made references to 3 year old SSDs I lost interest. |
Alex B (15479) | ||
| 1374957 | 2014-05-14 09:14:00 | I haven't seen any SSD that doesn't use wear-leveling. From my original link "Some storage devices (e.g., some solid-state drives, including USB flash drives) and some file systems utilize so-called wear-leveling mechanisms to extend the lifetime of the storage device or medium. These mechanisms ensure that even if an application repeatedly writes data to the same logical sector, the data is distributed evenly across the medium (logical sectors are remapped to different physical sectors). Therefore, multiple "versions" of a single sector may be available to an attacker. " If you need further more proof that using software encryption on an SSD is not good, here's a link from last month, from "Digital Forensics Consulting, LLC" discussing wear-leveling www.dfinews.com As mentioned before, nearly all new SSD have hardware based FDE built-in, however it adds an additional attack vector. |
kingdragonfly (309) | ||
| 1374958 | 2014-05-14 10:00:00 | Them: "You can 'bypass' this password thing can't you?" Me: "Um - no... Where are your [unencrypted] backups?" Them: "Ah......" (priceless look on face as reality hits) Me: ROFLMFAO Yeah, normal sign in passwords are a piece of cake to bypass. Had one last week a lady had called to clean out hers and sons Laptop, she didn't know the sons password, and couldn't get hold of him. She asked if there was a way to get around it - I said yes, but only with her permission - she said go ahead, around a minute later I was working on it -- she was a little surprised :horrified & this was windows 8.1. Encrypted stuff as fred was describing :( |
wainuitech (129) | ||
| 1374959 | 2014-05-14 12:32:00 | Yeah, normal sign in passwords are a piece of cake to bypass. Had one last week a lady had called to clean out hers and sons Laptop, she didn't know the sons password, and couldn't get hold of him. She asked if there was a way to get around it - I said yes, but only with her permission - she said go ahead, around a minute later I was working on it -- she was a little surprised :horrified & this was windows 8.1. How about those Microsoft account 8.x logins? ;) Arggghh, people and passwords. :badpc: Setup new PC, what's your Skype password? "I don't have one", ditto email. Sure you don't :lol: |
Renegade (16270) | ||
| 1374960 | 2014-05-15 11:11:00 | Had a call today, the person had a laptop that's gotten encrypted, no idea of what was done apart from theres a message saying the drive is encrypted -- Asked how much to decrypt it --Didn't like the reply to much :( How about those Microsoft account 8.x logins? Working on that one. Theres a method but have not tried it yet. If its only the local account that's easy as falling off a slippery log while drunk ;) |
wainuitech (129) | ||
| 1374961 | 2014-05-15 20:07:00 | I'd really need to known the model of the laptop, OS, and the text of the prompt to take a guess. Many corporate laptops have "self-encrypting drives" SED (hardware based using the TPM). These are NOT tied to a Windows account, almost always tied to the physical MAC address and stored in a Enterprise level central key server Alternatively course BitLocker is popular. (software based encryption) Note many other products, like TrueCrypt, has an easy to change prompt to anything, to fool the theft. You can look at the boot sector, to give an indication of the encryption, but this of course doesn't get you anywhere near finding the password. |
kingdragonfly (309) | ||
| 1374962 | 2014-05-15 22:10:00 | windowssecrets.com Some quick reading for those interested, discusses Win8 & secureboot issues with whole disk encrytion "TrueCrypt, for example — which might well be the world’s most popular open-source, whole-disk encryption tool — currently doesn’t work on Win8 systems using Secure Boot. This situation will most likely change in the future; but today, some TrueCrypt users who upgraded from Win7 to Win8 have run into severe trouble, such as losing access to the entire contents of their hard drives." |
1101 (13337) | ||
| 1374963 | 2014-05-17 08:32:00 | I find the FireWire security hole a bit shocking: "The [Inception] tool can unlock (any password accepted) and escalate privileges to Administrator/root on almost* any powered on machine you have physical access to. " this is just the way it works. Any system with Firewire or Thunderbolt ports are vulnerable to Direct Memory Access (DMA) attacks when the computer is turned on or is in the Standby power state You can mitigate this by Shutting down the system when not in use Don't use standby Don't use just TPM protection for a 2nd factor Removing Thunderbolt and Firewire ports (not that easy if your laptop already has them) |
nmercer (3899) | ||
| 1374964 | 2014-05-17 08:36:00 | My very first sentence said most people don't care about encryption. It's inconvenient. Even when there's no performance degradation, you still have to do / have something extra to start your PC. Hopefully it of interest to a couple of people. full volume encryption can be configured to not require a 2nd factor but to just use the machines TPM, so there isn't anything extra to do when starting the PC this is particularly handy on Windows Tablets |
nmercer (3899) | ||
| 1374965 | 2014-06-05 23:53:00 | An update to this thread, in May 2014, Truecrypt began displaying message that it was no longer secure. Needless to say, if you were using Truecrypt, decrypt your partition. An open-source alternate is DiskCryptor See this link www.ilovefreesoftware.com |
kingdragonfly (309) | ||
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