A post on Bruce Schneier’s blog has lead me to this product release statement by Guidance Software Inc. Apparently they have made a revolutionary new super awesome USB stick that can snoop the hard drive of a computer and my sensitive data…
http://investors.guidancesoftware.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=384544
From the article…
Unlike existing computer forensics solutions, EnCase Portable runs on a USB drive, rather than a laptop, and enables the user to easily and rapidly boot a target computer to the USB drive, and run a pre-configured data search and collection job. The ease-of-use and ultra-portability of EnCase Portable creates exciting new possibilities in data acquisition. Even personnel untrained in computer forensics can forensically acquire documents, Internet history and artifacts, images, and other digital evidence, including entire hard drives, with a few simple keyboard clicks.
Well I have some sad news for them. This super awesome data mining drive won’t work on my machines. Why? Because I encrypt all of my drives.
The beauty is almost all modern operating systems have drive encryption technology now. Mac OS X has a feature called FileVault that encrypts your entire home directory. Windows from Vista up have a technology called BitLocker that encrypts your Windows partition. I don’t have much knowledge of BitLocker but FileVault works like a charm. All of your files get encrypted into an AES disk image which can only be decrypted via your password. Good luck with my information Guidance Software.
Source: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/new_computer_sn.html