I was reading an article in Rolling Stone last night about hackers. Something one of the ‘hackers’ said was that he slept with his laptop next to him, plugged but without the battery, ‘just in case they police came’. Can anyone tell me why this made him more comfortable? I assume it was something to do with the hard drive and/or the computer’s ability to … actually I have no clue at all.
Wrong link … I’m googling for it now …
Maybe he thought he’d have time to type ‘rm -rf *’ into the terminal window before they ripped if from his cold dead hands.
Don’t do this on your computer unless you want everything erased.
Does the hacker in question run programs that take a great deal of time? (I’m thinking mostly of password crackers, but perhaps there are other nasties out there that take a great deal of time to run). Having the laptop beside you plugged in with no battery means that you can instantly shut down when they boot open your door; just yank the power cord. Naturally that wouldn’t keep the hacker out of trouble but at least it would be fractionally harder to prove that he had nasty programs running.
I can’t find a GOOD example of the story online … but I’m still looking …
That said no at the point in the story that he mentions doing this he has a large network of other hackers working for him, i got the impression we wasn’t doing a lot of the personal hacking anymore.
Link here but I can’t find the exact quote. If anyone can find a better link the story was called “Hacker’s gone wild”.
http://www.youkioske.com/musica/rolling-stone-magazine-10-june-2010/ Look on page 64 where the story starts … not the best way to read it I realized.
If he was planning to use the computer for any reason, like deleting evidence, it seems like he’d want to use the battery so the computer wouldn’t come unplugged mid-raid and fail to erase the evidence.
That would actually assist the police because yanking the power is the first step of computer forensics. If you shut down a computer normally, all the programs exit cleanly and clean themselves up. Yanking power leaves all the data in place just as it was when it was running.
He said it in a context of “this will help me if I get busted” but the author paid that part (rightfully so) very little attention and I was left wondering.
No luck finding a link to the actual story ;-/
My WAG is he was using a RAM disk to hold his operating environment. Pull the power, and all traces are gone with nothing on disk.
Turn the computer back on, and it boots into a vanilla Windows installation.
Hehe says a person called ‘gotpasswords’ … from a completely ignorant on hacker and or most tech stuff that makes sense to me …
Got Passwords … follow on question then, so the only thing on his harddrive would be the operating enviroment (Windows or whatever) … the computer wouldn’t ever write to at all?
Maybe it just means that this is a quick way to log off by yanking the cord. Suppose I have an encrypted hard drive (using something like TrueCrypt) - I wouldn’t want a policeman to get his hands on the laptop while I am still logged on. Once the computer is turned off, they can turn it on but can’t access the files without knowing my TrueCrypt password.