Computer Repairman Steals Hard Drive, Tries To Charge Company For 'Retrieving' Data

from the so-close-yet-so-far dept

It's widely known that internal staff are the biggest threat to IT security, but what about your computer repairman? After a hard drive was stolen from Real Living Action Realty in Pennsylvania, the company called Kevin Andrew Lutes, who had done repair work for them in the past, to fix the machine. He told them he could retrieve the files, but the owner later called the computer manufacturer and learned that it's impossible to do this... without the hard drive. Oh, and the police learned that Lutes' car -- computer repair sticker and all -- was spotted outside the office on the night of the break-in. When he returned a few days later with the stolen hard drive back inside the computer and tried to charge the company $2000 for the "repair," Lutes was arrested and charged with theft. You'd think that with potential access to the machine, he could have done something a little more subtle or sinister, but, lucky for the company, their repairman turned out to be a pretty dumb criminal. Someone should let him know that basing a business model on artificial scarcity is a bad idea...

Blaise Alleyne is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Blaise Alleyne and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Seagate Decides It Can't Compete With Solid State; Sues Over Patents

from the shows-how-comfortable-Seagate-is dept

Just a few weeks ago, we noted that Seagate's CEO appeared to be admitting that his company didn't have a real strategy to compete with the growing threat of solid-state flash drives competing against traditional hard drives. Instead, he said that if the competition got too hot, he'd just sue for patent infringement. Basically, he was admitting that he was planning to use patents in exactly the opposite of the way they were intended to be used. He'd use them to block an innovative new competitor, but only once that competition became serious enough. Apparently, Seagate believes that moment is now, as we're seeing more and more laptops hit the market with solid state drives, so Seagate has filed its first patent infringement lawsuit against a maker of the technology. Basically, the company is admitting that it can't actually compete or make a better product, so its strategy is to sue competitors. It's a pretty weak response, but thanks to our patent system, it may be perfectly legal (if exactly the opposite of what the patent system intended).

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Seagate: If Flash Drives Get Too Cheap, We'll Use Patents To Make Them Expensive

from the just-as-Thomas-Jefferson-intended dept

Back in 2005, we pointed out that Seagate's CEO, Bill Watkins, should be worried about the future of flash solid state drives (SSDs) eventually replacing hard drives. It's taken some time, but those SSDs are starting to show up in laptops like the MacBook Air and the Lenovo Thinkpad x300. Reader Nick Burns points out that Watkins appears to be singing the same old tune, with one slight adjustment. For the most part he's doing the "nothing to see here, flash drives are still too expensive" song and dance -- but people who understand the inevitable march of technology (and how the innovator's dilemma works) are finally pointing out flash is getting much cheaper very, very quickly. So what's Watkin's response? If SSDs get really cheap, he'll just sue everyone for patent infringement. Yes, even though SSDs are totally different technology than a standard hard drive, Seagate's holding on to patents that cover "many of the ways a storage device communicates with a computer." So, if solid state drives suddenly get popular, Watkins plans to sue. In other words, he'll use patents to stop the competition of a totally different technology. It's the same old story. When you're losing in the marketplace, sue for patent infringement. If you want to know the point at which Seagate has realized it's lost the battle, just look for when the infringement lawsuits come out. Just as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison envisioned.

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Ed Felten Defeats Hard Drive Encryption

from the ed-felten-strikes-again dept

Ed Felten, and the various grad students who work for him at Princeton, have done plenty to contribute to the computer security field (and make quite a name for themselves), from breaking the old SDMI encryption that the recording industry insisted was unbeatable (which nearly got Felten sued) to showing just how vulnerable e-voting machines are. However, he may have just broken his biggest story yet. Felten and a group of colleagues have now shown that hard disk encryption is incredibly easy to beat. This should be a huge concern, considering how many people and organizations rely on data encryption to protect important data. In fact, with many of the "lost" hard drive stories over the past few years, many organizations have insisted the risk was minimal, since the data was all encrypted. Yet, as Felten's team shows in this video below, not only is it quite easy to defeat the encryption using a simple can of compressed air, in some cases, there isn't much that can be done to protect against this. As the video notes, this won't work on some systems if the computer is turned completely off and the encryption package opens up before the operating system boots -- but otherwise, most systems are vulnerable.

Basically, they've figured out that, despite what many believe, data held in RAM does not disappear immediately when the power is cut. And, if you freeze the chip, you can make the data last a very long time. This is important, because for disk encryption, the key to unlocking the data resides in the RAM. If someone can access that key in the RAM and make a copy of it, then they can unencrypt all of the data without knowing your password.

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Seagate Hard Drives Came With Trojan Pre-Installed

from the no-extra-charge,-either dept

There have been plenty of stories this year about problems with Chinese manufacturing outlets, though, not many of them have touched on the technology industry. Now, however, Seagate is admitting that some of its hard drives that were made in China came with a trojan horse password sniffer pre-installed. It mostly targeted Chinese online games, but the one American game it included was the ever-popular World of Warcraft. On the plus side, the trojan also disables any other password stealing keyloggers that it finds. Seagate is now offering free copies of anti-virus software to customers impacted by this. In the meantime, experts suggest that you might want to format any new hard drives you get, just to be safe.

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