[thelist] [OT] Stolen laptop + Rails tip
T. R. Valentine
trvalentine at gmail.com
Thu Feb 16 07:27:32 CST 2006
On 16/02/06, Ian Anderson <ian at zstudio.co.uk> wrote:
> b. Is it likely that the person that gets it will be able to boot it up
> and access the hard disk as a mounted volume from a different PC?
I've taken hard drives from Windows PCs (NT, 2k) that wouldn't boot,
installed them in a different PC as a slave and been able to access
all the files.
> c. Booting from a floppy or CD, do they get to see files on the hard disk?
Yes.
> d. Can they reinstall Windows while preserving all the files and settings?
Preserve files, yes. Preserve settings, no.
> I am somewhat concerned about personal information and things like user
> logins. Dreamweaver and my FTP program are set up for one-click access
> to a bunch of client sites, and my email archive has a lot of passwords
> in it.
They can probably preserve passwords; reading passwords is more
difficult, but not impossible.
> How much risk is there of this information being explored by the
> recipient? I am hoping that the thing will be wiped sooner rather than
> later - I understand from the cops that this is usual practice because
> the software is personalised and therefore traceable to the original
> owner, but I'm still a bit worried.
Wiping completely clean (low level format) is what I've typically
seen. It is extremely difficult to remove user names completely
without doing so.
--
T. R. Valentine
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