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Stolen VA Laptop Recovered

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the vets-less-nervous dept.

lancejjj writes "Remember how the VA was pinning the theft of 26.5 million veterans' personal records on a hard working-but-renegade employee whose laptop was stolen? Surprise! It turns out that the employee had written permission to bring the sensitive data home. Fortunately, the laptop has been recovered. It is still unclear how the laptop was recovered, or if any of the veterans' personal data was leaked."

5 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. TrueCrypt by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 4, Informative

    After discovering truecrypt, I realized how easy it is to have your sensitive data secured. Provided that the laptop doesn't contain spyware, only the person with password to the truecrypt volume can read it. After it's turned off, nobody else can.

    And the hidden volumes feature in truecrypt makes it much harder to steal the data (not only you'd need the normal volume password, you'd also need the hidden volume password - IF there is a hidden volume, which you don't know).

    1. Re:TrueCrypt by VertigoAce · · Score: 4, Informative

      That isn't the purpose of the hidden volume. You only need the hidden volume password to access that volume. The actual purpose is so that if you are compelled to give access to the encrypted data you can just give out the outer volume's password. Used properly, there's no way to tell if there is a hidden volume or not, so no one can compel you to give the password for that volume. So basically, store some semi-sensitive data in the outer volume and your very sensitive data in the hidden volume. Maybe also create some volumes without hidden sections so you have plausible deniability.

    2. Re:TrueCrypt by citizenklaw · · Score: 4, Informative

      Disagree. On the preferences, TrueCrypt enables you to Auto-Dismount the encrypted partition when a user logs off, when the screen saver is launched, the computer enters power saving mode, if no data is read written for x amount of time, etc. You can even tell the program to force a dismount even if the volume contains open files/directories

      My settings are simple: dismount when I log off and when the computer goes into power saving mode. I like this little app.

      --
      the future is but past forgotten
  2. Bah... by citizenklaw · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nothing appeared to be copied? Bah. What's keeping a would be data thief to boot up with a Linux distro, copy at will and shutdown the computer

    .

    I use a utility called TrueCrypt on my computer. I don't use a Mac (I would if I had the money), but I think the Mac has a utility (built in to the OS to boot) that let's you encrypt the contents of your home folder. This utility (TrueCrypt) enables me to reserve a chunk of space on my HD and encrypt it. I'm pretty confident that if my laptop gets stolen, the data will be *reasonably* safe.

    This is just a mix of bad infosec policies and worse OS.

    --
    the future is but past forgotten
  3. Re:Data Wasn't Accessed by hazem · · Score: 4, Informative

    You don't even have to pull the drive.

    Just boot with knoppix, or some other bootable linux on a cd and do something like:

    dd if=/dev/hda |gzip -9 |ssh -l someuser somemachine.com "dd of=stolendrivebackup.gz"