
Confiscated 5 years ago?
My guess is there are a few updates to be run when he gets his kit back. Geeesh...
Accused computer hacker Lauri Love is in court today arguing with the National Crime Agency over whether the British government agency should return PCs they seized from him. Background Back in 2013, the US indicted Lauri Love over allegations he had hacked thousands of PCs in America and other countries. In the same year, …
Actually the combination Ctrl+Alt+Del is used exactly to prevent rootkits:
The reasoning is you can't capture this combination with a program that looks like the login screen and does a login in the background while capturing your password.
..yeah I still got the joke, sorry for being "this guy".
If only our American visitors could understand that other countries have different law enforcement agencies..
I don't know if I was from the USA I'd be rather annoyed at the need to dumb down like this. What next El' Reg? Headlines like "Teresa May (Sort of Britain's President, but not really) met in Brussels (not the vegetable, the city) with Jean Claude Juncker (More like our Pres.. but not as gropey) to discuss stuff which doesn't relate to oil, so President Trump isn't interested."
You would think the existence of a separate and distinct legal system and practice here in Scotland in their own polity would make them wise to the possibility. Let alone travel in modern Europe where there's little except a sign to indicate a border now.
But then we still get people from south of the border surprised at the fact. They think that our Sheriffs and Procurator Fiscals are just quaint names and the law is the same.
The Welsh, since Devolution, have built up a sufficient corpus of different Welsh law that they are thinking about separating out their legal system from England's for the first time since the 15thC.
And I haven't even mentioned the Channel Islands, Man and NI.
So really there is no excuse.
State laws is something that I found really odd although I guess you could say that as Scotland has it's own legal system and some of it's own laws the situation here isn't that different, just not as fractured. Then again, the distance from London to Edinburgh is far less than the drive across most states in the USA!
Oddly enough you could get caught out just crossing our invisible England/Scotland border as Scotland has extremely low drink drive limits so you're legal on one side, then bam - breaking the law once you pass that "Welcome to Scotland" sign.
Brits always run into problems over here because they don't realize that American states (and counties within states) have different laws, let alone law agencies
Worryingly many 'Brits' have problems in Britland, and don't realise that different parts of this scepter'd isle have different laws and regulations. Scotland and Wales are devolved nations, with (limited) law-making powers, and this means that visitors to Abersoch have to remember "We're not in Birmingham any more, Toto"
Oh yes, and in some parts we even speak a different language!
It's not just institutions being different that is the problem. I was reading a report in an American newspaper a few years ago about the Pakistan Department of Defense (sic) testing out chilli sprays for crowd control. It's a proper noun and it's Department of Defence.
I am aware that they probably have an official Urdu title as well but I don't think the Yanks would put "funny" characters in their newspapers any more than we would.
Back when I ..er.. sold magic mushrooms for a living (legally, I might add), I had a couple of sets of electronic scales taken by the Police and after a few months of no actual charge (again, because it was legal) we were able to get our hands back on them.
They'd also taken some of our stock and some other bits and bobs alongside, but I had no real interest in getting back x month old thoroughly-rotten fungal matter, just the scales, which were quite good ones and not cheap.
Annoyingly, the rotting fungal matter had conspired with the batteries to thoroughly rot the contacts, so we had to throw the scales out anyway.
Can't be too annoyed - this happened early on during those few short years where fresh mushrooms were legal, and we DID just try and walk into a festival with 4 large cooler boxes full of psychedelic wares. I shouldnt've been TOO surprised to not have been greeted with warm smiles and open arms by Police-backed security.
The only reason they are still holding on to it all was in case the US were successful in getting him extradited as obviously they computers might contain evidence.
Generally any evidence seized during a search warrant would be kept until either after trail, unless the charges were dropped.
AES, the de-facto go-to symmetric encryption algorithm was published in 2001.
128-bit AES is still currently not brute-forceable. There are some 'side-channel' attacks on implementation-specific vulnerabilities, i.e. dodgy coding on the encryption software.
Therefore 128-bit AES encrypted material from 2001 (we,, say 2003 to allow time for implementations to be available) is still secure from brute-force attack.
If the encryption software used isn't one of those with known implementation vulnerabilities, and the key wasn't just found lying around on a post-it note or stored in a ROT13/XOR'ed-type hash in the "my passwords.txt" file, then the rubber hose/telephone book method on someone who has the key is still the most effective attack vector.