attacks on firewire

[chris5126]

Hi guys,

I don’t know if you have heard you prob have of the new wake of vulnerability with fire wire. It where a hacker can gain access to the memory in your comp and use it to recover passwords to decrypt data or gain access to machines.

I know this requires physical access but if you think about it most it companies have cleaners who work out of office hours and could easily gain access to all systems with the right know how.

People say oh its an easy solution disable your firewire but in theory there is nothing to stop someone inserting a PCMCIA Firewire card into any laptop, Compaq or otherwise, and therefore Firewire enabling that laptop. Also it appears you can get USB-Firewire cables - does this mean you can plug Firewire into any USB port on any workstation or server, and will this attack then still work?

[UrbanKhoja]

Evening Chris,

Haven't heard of this one before. Please forgive me if I'm wrong but my belief was that Firewire was originally designed to be the next generation of USB before USB 2.0 was released with better data rates.

Firewire is typically used to transfer media from camera's and camcorder's etc.

Couldn't find any trace or reports of this on the net either.

Dazza :cool:

[chris5126]

hi if you google it there are a few articles about people dont see it as a serious threat as physical access is required but as i said it isnt hard for a hacker to join a cleaning team and having access to all!! Have a look at the below link explains about it and has some good links to more info.

http://cyberphob1a.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/firewire-attacks/

[jbennet]

keylock and a power on password are your solution