Hasta La Gadget!

Our British readers will already be painfully familiar with the comical propensity that government officials (even spies!) have for losing sensitive data while on the move. It might be an idea, therefore, to give your forgetful local representative a break with one of these new Corsair USB drives. The Padlock 2 features OS-agnostic password protection via the keypad you see above plus 256-bit encryption of the data stored on the flash inside. So even if someone is tenacious enough to pry the case open, he’ll have a hard time getting anything useful out of it. Oh, and don’t worry about forgetting the passcode, there’s a procedure for wiping the drive clean and generating a new one. 8GB units are available immediately, and we’ve spotted them online priced at £46 in the UK and $59 in the good old US of A.

Corsair’s Padlock 2 offers 256-bit AES encryption inside a rugged body originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As it turns out, Infineon may have been a little bit… optimistic when it said its SLE66 CL PE was “unhackable” — but only a little. The company should have put an asterisk next to the word, pointing to a disclaimer indicating something to the effect of: “Unless you have an electron microscope, small conductive needles to intercept the chip’s internal circuitry, and the acid necessary to expose it.” Those are some of the tools available to researcher Christopher Tarnovsky, who perpetrated the hack and presented his findings at the Black Hat DC Conference earlier this month. Initially, Infineon claimed what he’d done was impossible, but now has taken a step back and said “the risk is manageable, and you are just attacking one computer.” We would tend to agree in this case, but Tarnovsky still deserves serious respect for this one. Nice work, Big Gun.

Christopher Tarnovsky hacks Infineon’s ‘unhackable’ chip, we prepare for false-advertising litigation originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re selfishly daydreaming of how we could use something like this at the next CES, but chances are that Lockheed Martin is really only fixated on boosting its bottom line by assisting the US military. The company’s HULC exoskeleton, which was originally introduced by Berkeley Bionics in 2008, is seeing a significant upgrade this week courtesy of a fuel-cell power pack from Protonex. The goal? To strap a new, more potent battery onto the Human Universal Load Carrier that will support 72+ hour extended missions. Soldiers tend to carry around a lot more gadgetry now, all of which requires more and more power; with this pack, the men and women in the field could carry fewer conventional batteries while seeing an overall boost in available juice. There’s no mention of when exactly this stuff will be rolled out en masse, but that’s a detail you’ll probably never know, anyway.

Protonex fuel-cell batteries to power HULC exoskeleton for three solid days originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last year in Britain, 4,500 USB sticks were left in pockets of clothes that were sent to the dry cleaner. Don’t laugh, we’ve all done it: I even managed to run an iPod Nano through the wash (without killing it). The survey, paid for by data security company Credant Technologies, apparently highlights the dangers of putting sensitive company data onto the little thumb drives.

The thinking goes that absent-minded employees with dirty clothes could fall afoul of the UK’s Data Protection Act and incur fines of up to £500,000 ($813,000). The news isn’t all bad, though: the number of drives left in pockets has halved since last year.

Lest these new figures threaten Credant’s marketing plan (why else would you commission a survey other than to prove a point you had already decided upon?), the company has a new spin. Perhaps all this sensitive information is being loaded onto netbooks and smartphones? The horror. Remember when the iPod, with its then-capacious hard drive, was the garlic and stake to the corporate IT security team, banned from workplaces to protect precious noughts and ones from being spirited away? This is the same thing over again.

And anyhow, thumb-drives are the pocket lint of the modern day. Dry cleaners of course rummage through your pockets, and while loose change will always be a welcome perk, we imagine that the USB stick has lost all novelty and will simply be tossed away as if it were a hardened, desiccated Kleenex.

Data hung out to dry as 4,500 USBs are left in Dry Cleaners [Credant. Thanks, Yvonne!]

We’ve personally experienced the joys of portable wireless routers like Novatel’s MiFi, little things that do the 3G talkin’ for you, but from what we’re seeing here current users may be about to experience something altogether different: fear. A hack that is both very nasty and easy to execute has been shown which would, most troublingly, allow a malicious page to modify the MiFi settings on behalf of the user, possibly disabling security or even locking out the owner of the router, as shown in a quick demonstration video after the break. A factory reset fixes it all, of course, but doesn’t do anything to alleviate the apparently shoddy security mechanisms at play here. Time for another firmware update, perhaps?

Continue reading Novatel’s MiFi devices shown to be incredibly useful, easily hacked (video)

Novatel’s MiFi devices shown to be incredibly useful, easily hacked (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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