Pod Slurping Comes Around Again

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the repeating-it-won't-make-it-true dept

Time and time (and time) again enterprise IT managers have been warned about the dangers of “pod slurping’ — people using iPods or other high-capacity mp3 players as portable hard drives to steal information from corporate PCs and networks. The hype wave is coming around again, apparently because somebody wrote a program that can copy files from a computer to an iPod (you need a program to do that now?). The author’s vision of how a slurping attack would occur has a would-be thief coming into an office disguised as a janitor, then going from PC to PC copying information. The issue isn’t that the thief is using an iPod to copy files, that’s irrelevant. The problem is that a company is letting in people disguised as janitors, with or without iPods. A reporter calls the threat “fast emerging” — but by the end of the post, she says “It’s unclear how much of a threat iPod slurping really is today. I haven’t found any information on companies that actually suffered due to iPod slurping; of course, they aren’t likely to tell the world of security breaches they’d suffered, either.” All these scare stories do is sell useless analyst reports and pointless security software. Like so many before this one, new technology really doesn’t raise any new security problems for reasonably intelligent people. What’s next? An urgent report from a security expert detailing the emerging threat of these things called “brains” that let users store all kinds of information — even stuff not stored on a computer — for later off-site retrieval? You heard it here first.