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Delete Data On Netbook If Stolen?

Posted by kdawson on from the grab-brick-smash-window dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I have just moved overseas on a 2-year working holiday visa and so I picked up a netbook for the interim, an MSI Wind U100 Plus running WinXP. I love it to bits. But as I am traveling around I am somewhat worried about theft. Most of my important stuff is in Gmail and Google Docs; however, I don't always have Net access and find it useful to gear up the offline versions for both. Ideally I would like to securely delete all the offline data from the hard drive if it were stolen. Since it is backed up in the cloud, and the netbook is so cheap I don't really care about recovery, a solution that bricks it would be fine — and indeed would give me a warm glow knowing a prospective thief would have wasted their time. But it's not good if they can extract the HD and get at the data some other way. All thief-foiling suggestions are welcome, be they software, hardware, or other."

14 of 459 comments (clear)

  1. Whole Disk Encryption by seifried · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The answer to your problem is whole disk encryption, not trying to delete the data.

    1. Re:Whole Disk Encryption by grcumb · · Score: 5, Funny

      The answer to your problem is whole disk encryption, not trying to delete the data.

      Feh. Your so-called answer does not include the word 'thermite' or the phrase 'earth-shattering kaboom'. And you call yourself a geek?

      --
      Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
    2. Re:Whole Disk Encryption by mjwx · · Score: 5, Funny

      Feh. Your so-called answer does not include the word 'thermite' or the phrase 'earth-shattering kaboom'. And you call yourself a geek?

      Where's the ka-boom. There was supposed to be an earth shattering ka-boom.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
    3. Re:Whole Disk Encryption by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      the part where the original poster said "Running WinXP" may not have made it all the way in.

      I despise answers that randomly suggest competing products without really answering the question. It's like "My lawnmower won't start" and "Well, if you had goats, then you could feed them a different feed to make them more motivated." Try to advertise less and answer the frakking question more, MMkay?

    4. Re:Whole Disk Encryption by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Funny

      The correct answer is truecrypt for Windows XP then simply encrypt the drive and voila! No password no data. But I can't think of any other way to totally brick it and still have it legal to travel with. After all customs tends to frown on C4, even if all you are doing is trying to teach thieves a valuable lesson in respecting peoples property.

      Of course if you really wanted to make them suffer you could keep a small DOS partition and have it set to load in case of incorrect password and then use a batch file to play slides of Goatse and Tubgirl and maybe a few choice selections from 2 girls one cup, while playing a wav file of that damned annoying frog full blast on endless loop, but I think you may risk getting arrested for crimes against humanity. But I'm sure after the thief was done throwing up and washing out his eyes with bleach a valuable lesson would be learned.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  2. Encryption by pyite · · Score: 5, Informative

    Encrypt the entire drive with TrueCrypt or something. Use a strong cipher and a very strong passphrase. The laptop is as good as bricked to anyone who gets it.

    --

    "Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman

    1. Re:Encryption by man_ls · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Whole-Disk AES via TrueCrypt is only BARELY above the "acceptable" threshold on a Core Solo. I cringe to think what it'd be like on an Atom. A better bet would be to use a container-hosted TrueCrypt volume, and set your My Documents folder into that volume.

    2. Re:Encryption by Sodakar · · Score: 5, Interesting

      On N270 Atoms, whole-disk AES encryption works perfectly fine, and the only time I notice a slow-down is when I'm running a benchmark program side-by-side with a model that has an unencrypted drive. For regular browsing and e-mail (which is what the person asking the question listed as a qualification), it's a non-issue.

      As some others have posted, and what my local police have told me, the laptop will likely have been sold for cash in less than 24 hours. Unless you are being targeted specifically for something of significant value such as corporate IP, it's unlikely that anyone is going to spend the time to try to unencrypt your drive.

      But other threats still loom...

      If you plan on connecting to any network, you will expose your machine to any network-based threat, so you ought to harden your machine accordingly.

      Make sure you still have a strong password for your account login. If your machine is in hibernate, the crypto authentication prompt will stop them, but if your machine was sleeping, it'll return to the OS prompt.

      The one scenario where you're not protected at all is if the machine is powered on, logged in, and someone grabs it by force. I realize there are proximity-based USB dongles that will lock the screen when the remote adapter is beyond range, but this may be far too impractical to use. A USB security dongle sticking out the side is a quick recipe for a broken USB port...

    3. Re:Encryption by Wrath0fb0b · · Score: 5, Informative

      My personal experience with a Inspiron 1520 is that whole disk encryption significantly reduces battery life, which is a real usability problem.

      Most likely, when I get back to the states (I only encrypted for some overseas travel anyway), I will decrypt it and move back to an encrypted truecrypt container for the small number of documents that are really sensitive.

  3. a hack by binford2k · · Score: 5, Funny

    set up a scheduled task to wipe the drive unless you cancel it. Then don't forget to cancel it.

    1. Re:a hack by YourExperiment · · Score: 5, Funny

      The OP says he's moved "overseas" so presumably some day he'll be travelling back to which ever country he came from

      Not necessarily, he might have moved out of the U.K.

      (No flames please, I'm British :)

  4. Truecrypt + fake account by dargaud · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As others will have already said: use truecrypt. In addition, use two account: yours with a password, and another one (visible from the login shell) without password. Put a script in it that wipes the disk if anybody logs in it.

    --
    Non-Linux Penguins ?
  5. Are you evil enough? by saynt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    First, get truecrypt, that takes care of your data.

      Now then, If you have the spark of evil in you, here's the plan.

        1. Set up multi-boot config.
        2. Create a bootable partition that has enough OS on it to run the drive and network, name it something interesting like 'Confidential'.
        3. Get the BIOS flash utils for your netbook, create a corrupt bios image that will still pass muster enough to install.
        4. Set up a boot time process on the netbook that does a 'wget' from a web site that you control. If it gets a file, quietly flash the BIOS with what it downloads.

        If you ever get ripped off, move the nasty BIOS image to the file location on your web site and bask in the glow of pure wickedness...

        You can test this with a valid BIOS image, but don't look at me if something terrible happens, you're playing with fire here.

  6. fencing by reiisi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    All the more reason to use a Linux or BSD based OS.

    To the average thief or receiver of stolen goods, a netbook running an alternate OS is as good as bricked.

    --
    Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.