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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."
...who took one look at this and thought "good."
Don't forget to view the photos. I thought the photos were more interesting than the article.
http://software.silicon.com/security/0,39024655,39270417,00.htm
And there's probably a certain amount of hysteresis too, so maybe that 0.3 gets overwritten with a 1 to become 0.93, and then with another 0 to become 0.393, and you can recover previous values to a degree limited by the amount of hysteresis, sensitivity of the detector, and noise floor. Or at least that's the theory I've always heard on why you're supposed to overwrite hard drives multiple times... I've never actually heard of it being done, but the assumption has always been that 'they' have the ability to do it. Anyone care to provide more substantial information on the feasibility of this sort of recovery?
if the cops had any brains they would shut off the phones (remove battery) the second they get it and then give it to forensics that should have the IQ to operate it in a faraday cage so that it cant be tampered with remotely. Do they take laptops and PC's they capture and hook them to the net and turn them on? Why do they connect phones to the network when they look at them?
Come on, I though they taught the police how to handle evidence. Are you telling me that CSI tv show is a LIE!!!!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When I took my computer forensics class they showed that you could use a hex editor on a zero wiped floppy disk and recover most of the data that was on it previously.
We had a guest speaker that told us some of what he does, he's a forensic analyst that pulls information from drives in criminal cases. He said that it takes somewhere around 72 hours to read a decent sized drive and costs around $10k to get it done.(It's been a few years so the details are fuzzy but that sounds about right)
But he wasn't too specific on what tools they use etc. Something around 10 full wipes is easy enough to recover the original data but if you write over it and delete actual data it becomes more corrupted and harder to get back than just all 1 then all 0.
Sorry it sounds like a "In Soviet Russia" thing but it is true.
Symbian/WinMobile smart phones have tools to lock the handset remotely or in case of new Kaspersky antivirus/security or other 3rd solutions, you can remotely instruct phone to delete all personal data irrecoverably and lock itself. I am almost sure Blackberry, being an enterprise focused device must have similar option.
Once the Apple decided not to allow background running processes, they lost that possible solution. Not just they don't allow anyone to implement it, they don't implement it themselves too.
It is a completely fool safe thing. User sends a previously set SMS to device, device locks itself. Or in Kaspersky case, it doesn't just lock itself, it wipes its data and optionally transforms itself to a white hat (for you) rootkit/trojan and sends the number of first SIM card plugged to device to previously set number.
any tool that accesses the drive's smart data can get this. the drive has to be directly connected to the computer, you cannot read smart via usb or firewire bridge. All drives track a small set of smart data including reallocated blocks. Most drives have additional smart parameters whose meaning varies.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
you can't easily pop those things open and mount the custom flash chip into some universal adapter
Very very few devices use custom flash chips. The iPhone uses off the shelf standard flash memory chips. And in addition to readers that require the removal of the chip, there are units that have cables with clips that just attach right to the chip in the (powered off) device and can pull the data straight off.
And yes you can pop them open pretty easy. Some ipods are harder to open than an iPhone.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Two things.
First, ever had a magnet accidentally come into contact with your TV? Ever tried to fix it with another magnet, and deemed it "close enough"? There you go. You are a floating head. Your TV is a disk platter.
Second, hand in your geek card.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.