Slashdot Mirror
Criminals Remote-Wiping Cell Phones
An anonymous reader writes "Crafty criminals are increasingly using the remote wipe feature on the Apple iPhone and other business handsets, such as RIM's BlackBerry, to destroy incriminating evidence, the head of the UK's Serious Fraud Office Keith Foggon has warned. Foggon told silicon.com that the move away from PCs towards using mobile phones was causing a headache for crime fighters who were struggling to keep up with the fast pace of new handsets and platforms churned out by the mobile industry."
Magnetism is an analog property used to store digital information. A bit can be wiped so that a standard detector would read it as a zero, but the bit may be legible by a more sensitive detector.
For instance, say that anything above "0.5" (half of the full possible theoretical strength of the magnetic field there) is a 1, and anything below is a 0. Maybe, the drive would actually write "0.9", which would be correctly interpreted as 1. If that number was blanked, maybe it becomes "0.3"....low enough to be a 0, but maybe another detector could tell the difference and know what the original value was.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
PS: For remote wiping, you need to be on a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), which usually means your BB is company-issued. If you need it nuked, call up your admin and ask him to trigger the remote wipe. Keep in mind that the BES can (and usually does) track anything and everything that happens on a BES-connected BB, so a wipe will do nothing to hide things from your company.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Modern hard drives pack bits *very* densely. The bits overlap by a large amount. The technology to determine whether a bit is 1 or 0 by calling everything above 0.5 a "1" is already necessary to read the bit *normally*. Writing random data to the drive is enough to make any active sectors unrecoverable.
However, modern drives have a huge count of spare sectors, and sectors get retired constantly, and there's no way to wipe those with normal reads and writes. So there's a random sampling of everything you've ever written stored in the retired sectors of a hard drive, and no in-band way to wipe those sectors.
The is why the government standard for hard drves that have ever contained classified information is to shred the hard drive so that the pieces fit through a 1mm sieve. Of course, in reality, the government is just as likely to sell the drives unwiped on Ebay, but that's bureaucracy for you.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.