Merde! French Prez palace blueprints nicked from cable layer An unlucky cable worker lost the ground plans for France's most important government buildings when his USB stick was nicked. According to a report in Le Parisien, translated by Le Reg foreign desk, thieves grabbed the unnamed man's flash drive and other possessions from a car after he parked up to meet someone in the Gare de …
hardware encrypted sticks are actually pretty cheap these days. You still need some software so you can enter the password to decrypt the stick. The software on all the ones I've seen runs on Windows and OSX. I guess some of the expensive models might also have a linux version.
The problem here though is that the files were almost certainly once encrypted. Contractor requires plans of buildings, client sends plans in an encrypted format. Contractor decrypts plans and sends to sub contractor who places them on a stick and loses them.
> why anyone carries sensitive data on an unencrypted USB device these days.
Because it is not sufficiently painful for them when things go horribly wrong.
So they are offered the choice between the pain of learning how to use encryption or - not dealing with any pain at all.
Guess which one they choose?
Vic.
er,not true,you would have a heart attack at what you can find going through some planning offices.
you would malso have attack at some of the plans and data that i have come across on old drives out of skips,especialy some of the ones that come from a certain data destruction company that still appears to put working ie's into skips on a local industrial estate,prisons,government establishments and private sites etc etc have been found on one particular make of old scsi drives,when i used to come across drives that had sensitive data i used to mil grade destructer and then put a fire axe through them,just to avoid any come back on myself for others fraud and laziness.i even contacted firm involved and not even recieved an email or call in reply.
when i last looked in skip at data destruct firm it looked like they where still putting complete drives in skip.
i have kids now so i stay away from iffy sources of pc parts.
Not that we'll ever know for sure, but I'm willing to bet that these were simple Autocad or PDF files that were never encrypted to begin with. It all has to do with the level of detail in the drawings. If they were simple circuits or one line diagrams then not much damage would have been done. If this went out to bid, there would have been so many people looking at them that there could not have been any real concern about security. Just one company could have had 10 people with access to the plans.
The REALLY secure stuff doesn't have any plans to begin with. You bid from a "Narrative" of the work involved and guess from there.
I can't say too much but I have seen plans for Federal Prisons that had less security than those for your local Starbucks. Some "private" bids are far more secretive such as a new Yogurt plant being built nearby. You would have thought they were building missile silos in the '50's.
It was probably just a random EUR10 USB stick with some random and useless files on it. Now the thief knows that it might possibly be worth a lot more than that, if he can find an interested buyer.
If it was a targetted robbery, it'd make much more sense to replace it with an identical drive that had been "pre-corrupted" so that the user would just thing the drive had gone bad, and wouldn't raise the alarm.
If they just wanted a handy scare story to encourage people to encrypt important information, they could have just made the incident up.
By the way, didn't they used to have laws against encryption in France?
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