Pc Security

[Tryn2]

I went on a site who had a sticky on PC security and always wondered why it wasnt a higher priority on all sites ....

 

[eliteforce]

ah smashing your hd everytime you get paranoid that the feds are coming seems like an expensive option, not to mention a total pain in the ass, keeping your stuff on a removable hd maybe-but howda ya know the booting drive isn't keeping some data from it in a system file somewhere and also a pain in the butt-and then where do you keep the romovable disk..


the best and esiest option:just keep anything related to aas transactions in your ef/cyberrights/hushmail email box..theres nothing illegal about looking at messageboards or surfing bb sites, the only illegal part are the aas deals themselves..

 

[BadboyAl]

Smashing the HD would only be if you were arrested or you had a warrent out for your arrest and you feel information on the HD could be used against you. IN this case f*ck the HD and smash it.

If your arrested for some possesion they arent going to search your HD for missing evidence.

Keeping info on a removable HD is not the answer because all your info is stored on your main drive unless you make your external HD your operating system driver. Which would be reasonable. You can easy disconnect and hide it.

But there is only 1 way to truly cover your ass. SMASH!

 

[Bourget]

Satchboogie posted a link to a segment that ran on HBO awhile back about steroid use by older men. In the piece their were two guys, one about 40 years old and the other about 70, both evidently living in the US. They showed to 40 year old going down to Mexico for the gear apparantly to bring it back home. They also showed them injecting themselves and touting steroids as a wonder drug(which I believe they are).

Now why would these guys go on a show like that and divuldge all that info? I mean really! Why don't they just yell "Come and get me!!" This is why I am not too afraid of using gear. I find it hard to believe that the Feds would target some nobody for possessing enough gear for personal use.

I think, unless you distribute the only way you would get caught is if the cops stopped you for something else and just happened to come across the gear.

There are also alot of VERY obvious steroid users they could target to make an example out of besides my meaningless ass!

Bourget

 

[Big_Joe]

What if you use encryption, or encrypted email accounts? That should keep things protected right? Or can they decode that too?

rizz

If you have an encrypted email account, such as hushmail, all the information is on hushmails server. It is difficult to crack your password, if you used a good passphrase. But there will be information in your browsers cache.

The best way to protect yourself is to not use a hard drive at all. For those times when you want to leave no trace boot off of a live linux CD. It will have everything in memory and nothing on the hard drive. When you poweroff it is all gone.

 

[wirednutz]

I'm pretty certain there is a back door to PGP

There is a backdoor to everything. No programmer locks himself out of his work.

 

[nuevo laredo]

The info isnt really erased its just doesnt have a link to your operating system. But the police and feds have a program that collects the loose data on the drive.

Right - that's really basic. I don't know sh1t about this stuff and still understand that. Writing a program to recover isn't any magic either - my roommate in college did it for a Computer Science class he was taking. With his program you had to manually identify a block of data that you thought was the beginning of a "deleted" file that wasn't referred to by the FAT table, and then his program would piece together the other blocks of data that formed the file. Worked great as long as pieces hadn't been overwritten by other files or the drive hadn't been defragged.

My employer provides different types of security from computer to personal. I don't do the computer stuff but those wankers tell me that once you have overwritten a deleted file a bunch of times with random data it is almost impossible to recover what was overwritten. They say there is still a chance to recover bits and pieces using something called an electron microscope but that whoever wants it done will pay a heavy tax (tens of thousands of $) and only get bits of files. Its the type of thing done when the stakes are very high.

How about we use a program to overwrite deleted files numerous times and then defrag our hard drive once a week? Does that sound like a recipe for some level of security?

It would be nice if an expert here put together a list of the top things to do and not do concerning security and perhaps a list of products to assist. Then turn that into a sticky.

 

[djsf]

Overwriting the blocks on the disk with other files will make deleted files unrecoverable by undelete utilities, but a forensics team can still pull out the original data. It's like using a cassette recorder to record over one song with another. In the quiet passages you can still hear bits of the previous song. A forensics team can use a similar appriach to pull out the "old bits" from under the "new bits" (though my bet is they wouldn't bother doing that unless you were a suspected big-time dealer).

Evidence eliminator overrides delteted files something like 5-7 times with totally random data. The old bits cannot be recovered with that many overwrites. It's an inexpensive program for the truly paranoid.

 

[TheMesonator]

If it's a big enough issue, just open the thing up and break the platters. It's easy enough to do, and won't take more than 10 minutes. Sure, I guess you could call it expensive, but hard drives are so cheap these days that I don't consider it that big a hit.

I mean if it's a big enough deal to worry about for him seriously, isn't ~$100 worth it?