What is OmniNerd?

Welcome! OmniNerd's content is generated by you, the reader. Through voting and moderation we strive to highlight the nerdiest of what's around and provide content that's a little more thought provoking than other sites.

Submit New Content

Voting Booth

Choosing Sarah Palin as a Vice Presidential running mate was?

View Results, All Polls
39 votes, 8 comments
2
Nerd-Its
+ -

RE: Maybe...

Comment comment by PowerPointSamurai on 15 March 2008

I really can't think of much else that would work though. I have a Firewire digital camcorder, a scanner, and some external hard drives, but I can only imagine the latter working for this hack.

And again, the target disk mode has been around on the Mac for a long time, so it kind of bewilders me that this would pop up as a vulnerability on the PC after all this time.

(With the target disk mode on the Mac, I can plug two Macs together by a Firewire cable, boot up the first, and hold down a key combo on the second to start it up as an external hard drive for the first. This is really handy for data recovery or diagnostics if something goes really wrong with your system. But, this has been around for a while, and there are safeguards against unauthorized access.)

You are a viewing a subset of a larger discussion.
View Full Discussion
Star This to Save in Your Profile Favorite
Thread parent sort order:
Highest Voted : Lowest Voted : Oldest : Newest
Thread verbosity:
Expand All : Minimize Replies to Comments
2 Nerd-Its - +
RE: Maybe... by VnutZ :: NR8

And again, the target disk mode has been around on the Mac for a long time, so it kind of bewilders me that this would pop up as a vulnerability on the PC after all this time.

Yes - but it has absolutely nothing to do with the target disk mode.

The iPod just presents itself as an easy device from which to start. But it's an attack vector that can be replicated using nothing more than a firewire cable, a PC board and an embedded microprocessor. There are any number of micro-PCs these days and laptops with firewire that would allow software to make use of in order to perform the hack. The iPod is just innocuous and fits in your pocket - walk up to a PC, plug it in, the Linux hack writes a virus/rootkit/etc onto the target, you unplug and walk away. Go home and hack it when they reconnect. THAT's the hack. It's not going up and using a disk like mode to read their data while they're not looking.

Posted 15 March 2008, Hide, Parent, Reply