Hot answers tagged hardware
55
In 2011 the news was reporting on HP Printers catching fire. HP Responded saying that there was a hardware element called a "thermal breaker" to prevent this from happening. The researcher never produced a burning pile of printer.
Also in 2011 Charlie Miller was researching the firmware on Apple's batteries trying to get them to explode or catch fire.
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51
Physical destruction of a drive is tricky business. There are many companies that deal specifically in the field of data destruction, so if you are doing any kind of mass you may want to at least look at their price list. If you contract, make sure the company is properly bonded/insured, and provides audit trails for each destroyed item. In the worst case ...
44
Overview
First, I learned a lot of my information from a combination of my amateur radio experience and an awesome talk I sat in at DEFCON 18. The majority of satellite systems are simple repeaters. The signal that comes in on a transponder is cleaned, amplified, and retransmitted. If you know the location and input frequency, and you pump more effective ...
22
Yes. If you do a normal format, the old data can be recovered. A normal format only deletes/overwrites a tiny bit of filesystem metadata, but does not overwrite all of the data itself. The data is still there. This is especially true on SSDs, due to wear levelling and other features of SSDs.
The following research paper studies erasure of data on SSDs:
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22
It's taking me a few minutes to come up with something beyond, "That's patently damn absurd!"
But... I guess like many things, nobody would write it if somebody didn't buy it. My first thought from the formatting and related image is that this was sensationalist crud from a few decades ago. After all, that machine has a 5 1/4" floppy... but they're talking ...
13
What would be required to hack a satellite (in general terms, any hack really)?
When it comes to satellites, the word general does not apply. Almost every satellite, with very few exceptions is custom. Even the currently orbitng GPS satellites are not all the same: there are GPS IIA, GPS IIR, GPS IIR-M, and GPS IIF. I would venture that even satellites ...
12
There was a presentation at BlackHat yesterday where they used a Arduino to open hotel rooms that are using a certain kind of lock: http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Arduino-used-as-master-key-for-hotel-rooms-1652281.html
As devices get smaller and more powerful, that are getting better suited to be used as pentesting drop boxes. Examples are:
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12
1. Backdoor testing accounts.
Engineers often include backdoor mechanisms and testing accounts in hardware for debugging purposes, with trivial or no security measures put in place to protect them. Unfortunately, a large number of devices make it to market without having these mechanisms and accounts disabled, allowing attackers to gain illegitimate access ...
11
This an incident you need to handle and I am guessing that a standard response has not been detailed in your documentation.
Realize that your system is malfunctioning. It is not operating the the way it was intended to.
Isolate your system [meaning your network(s) and physical facility if possible] to prevent the data from leaving your system. Take care ...
11
This should be sufficient at least for the moderately to quite paranoid:
Change BIOS settings to boot only from the harddisk, so you can't boot from other devices. Make sure to disable network boot, which is usually in the same menu.
Set up a password for changing BIOS settings and for startup, so nobody can get past the BIOS loading screen without ...
10
I used to work IT at an Airforce Base for a while and we actually had a couple of incidents like this happen.
First and foremost, make sure you notify the appropriate authorities of the incident. They will be able to instruct you further based on their current security policies.
You need to isolate access to the laptop. Shut it down completely,
boot ...
10
In lieu of waxing elequent in a topic that I am only briefly versed, I will defer my response to a DEFCON talk I saw last year that will do at least three things:
Blow your mind
Expose vulnerabilities in Sats
Enlighten your knowledge on the subject in painstaking detail (see item one)
Here is the archived talk with video. This is a very nice guy (Matt ...
10
@ewanm89 is entirely correct. Securing the connection between ground control and a plane should be no different from securing any regular connection.
The main issue is that the protocol designers are relying on security by obscurity. Obscurity through the relatively unknown protocol being used. Obscurity through what used to be relatively difficult to ...
10
The 7 and 35 passes very probably come from the paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" by Peter Gutmann. There, he described various overwrite patterns targeted at specific hard drive write encodings.
However, the paper, and the 35 passes, are now obsolete, as they were for old hard drive technology, as even the author readily ...
9
It's not impossible; Intel CPUs have had the ability to have new microcode uploaded into them for some time, and there are open source programs that can do so. If someone can then decipher the microcode, they could then produce modified microcode with a different CPUID string embedded in it. (It's supposed to have a checksum to prevent that, but I wouldn't ...
9
The only NIST approved method to securely erase a hard drive is by utilizing the secure erase internal command - documented at the Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR) - and that is what everyone should be doing. It is an ATA command, and covers (S)ATA interfaces.
After that, you can optionally degauss the drive to erase the firmware itself.
Lots ...
9
The whole idea of encryption is that it is meant to bring you confidentiality regardless of how the physical media is managed. Details about how a bit is "erased" (or fails to be erased) is relevant to security; encryption is about getting said security without having to bother with those details.
It turns out that data on a SSD is a fickle thing and it is ...
9
Summary thoughts:
Bad: SSD model that has a lousy secure erase mechanism.
Good: Any standard HDD; SSD model that is known to be good.
Best: SSD or HDD with hardware encryption. Any medium when using full disk encryption.
Detail:
Some background answers from other questions that will help out:
SSD (Flash Memory) security when data is encrypted in place
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9
If you remove the boot from CD and USB from your BIOS boot order it does increase security. Anyone cant easily drive by boot your machine when you are not there and copy all your hashes and sensitive information.
If you lose your BIOS password there is usually mechanisms to reset the BIOS back to default. Usually this involves opening the machine and using ...
9
Why are hard drives mounted by default in Windows OS, while they aren't in Linux OS?
Typical user-oriented GNU/Linux distros have automounters on by default.
Is that a security issue?
More like a usability issue.
If your computer was hacked, can unmounted drives be considered clean?
No, because the attacker could mount them, do his dirty ...
9
VGA and HDMI are not one-way; besides the main send-pictures functionality, there is some low-bandwidth bidirectional communication. This is how a computer can "know" that a new display was connected, and what resolution to use on that display. In the case of VGA, this was a backported feature (VGA displays from the early 1990s could not do that).
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8
"Celeron" is a brand name which Intel has applied to dozens of distinct processor designs. In particular, a number of dual core processors have been sold under the name "Celeron" (which, in Intel-speak, means "cheaper and reduced", but not necessarily "mono-core"). So your sales guy may have sold many Celeron "posing" as dual core processors because they are ...
8
The key here is what you define as "every day use" - if you work in an environment where the data is sensitive, your security policy should take into account the risk from wireless interception and if appropriate, the use of wireless devices should be forbidden.
Faraday cage equivalents, such as shielded rooms/buildings may be appropriate but are obviously ...
8
What you must ask before you continue:
Is risking the release of the sensitive data worth the amount of money made from the sale of the device?
If not, destruction is your safest bet.
If so, remove harddrive, EPROMS/memory, and the image drum, and sell for parts.
In my current environment, the only accepted answer by my employer is 100% destruction, but ...
8
When I worked for the .gov, the answer was to take it apart looking for storage media (which you remove and take care of). If it's still serviceable afterwards, then off to salvage (for sale or recycling) it goes!
I'm sure that they did something different (aka, tossed it in a shredder) for machines that held the scary stuff, I don't know.
8
From a theoretical standpoint the idea of total drive destruction may be the only way of destroying data on a hard drive fully.
From a practical standpoint, I've not seen any evidence that it's possible to recover meaningful data from a standard hard drive (ie, not taking SSDs or other devices that use wear levelling or similar technologies) after a once ...
8
In addition to the low-cost solutions presented in other answers, which rely on beaming signals at the satellites, there's the (significantly, like many orders of magnitude) more expensive technique borrowed from Ian Fleming's Moonraker of going up there and stealing the thing. You don't even really need to get it back, just pointing it in the wrong ...
8
The kind of attack you are talking is popularly coined as "Juice Jacking".
Are there any "known bad" or "known safe" smartphones with regard to USB security?
In my knowledge, NO.
How does a corporation protect from these risks?
By making policies (actually spreading awareness) about the threat
as many people yet aren't aware about it.
And ...
8
A few observations:
It's a 32-bit Linux OS. Difficult to tell which distro - might be something custom.
They're running the latest version of Bash shell.
It contains an NVRAM device, such as an onboard EEPROM, which failed to initialise due to corruption. These are often used as tamper-proof storage modules that contain the game code.
It's on the network ...
8
You don't. Some vendors do indeed ship backdoors with their products, and many computers come with "crapware" pre-installed as a source of revenue for the manufacturers. Even apps that don't contain a backdoor can cause other damage (e.g. Browser toolbars that track browsing).
Same concerns apply with hardware, especially in networking equipment.
What you ...
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