HAPPY PLANET- SECURITY
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  Welcome to Happy Planet - Security Section  
 

"Deep in the sea are riches beyond compare.
But if you seek safety, it is on the shore."

What to do you if you are attacked or hacked : Part Four

Hardware hacking?

How to spot a hardware based keylogger? How to spot TEMPEST attack? Cameras watching you as you type your passphrases? Someone tampering you phonelines etc? How about just lurking over your shoulder when you use your laptop computer? Its hard but not impossible. Again, prevention is the key issue here. Prevent anyone from entering the space where the computer is located and you have fixed this issue. Or if you are using a laptop computer, make sure you carry it with you all times even when you dont need it. Make sure tought that its not stolen...and if it is, you have nothing to worry about since all your sensitive data is protected by strong cryptography and passphrases and plaintext copies are wiped...right? RIGHT?!?

Hardware keyloggers can be very dangerous. But you can check your keyboard and especially the line in it. Anything special about? What about in the mainboard? Any strange box between your keyboard and computer or inside your keyboard? Even a tiny one? If there is, bingo! You might have found an advanced keylogger! These babys are pretty cheap actually. They can store a huge amount of data of your keypressings and there is absolutely no way you can discover then unless you know what you are looking at and where to look at. No software can find them. Sometimes they send to data as wireless to 10-50 meters away to main station that sends them forward.

Under TEMPEST attack? Maybe you are just a paranoid but again, you can never be to carefull. If you want to protect against TEMPEST, you need to implement so serious security precautions that they are beyond the scope of these pages. In general, if nothing can get out of the room you are in, TEMPEST is pretty much useless. That means, if you cant operate a radio or GSM phone in the room you are in, then you are propably safe from TEMPEST. A metal cage around the room should be enought to produce Faraday's cage.

Cameras and microphones and such can be tricky. Its easy to put a GSM phone in the room online so that it can be used as microphone! Very easy and cheap. You can buy devices that check for online GSM phones and they arent that expensive either. Some schools use them to make sure that students arent cheating at exams using their GSM phones (in here Finland atleast). Anyway, back to computers...the point is, that if you can hear the keyboard pressings, you can easily reconstruct what was typed. Dont underestimate microphones! Cameras are troublesome too. They can be hidden onto...well..anything. Finding them might be easy or it might be very hard. Just look around for anything strange in your room, especially somewhere up or in some holes. If you find it, rip it off and take it to someone who knows more about it...and search for more, if "they" could have planted one, they could have planted a dozen of them. If you discover that you have been spyed upon like this, concider EVERYTHING compromised. Everything!

Are you phonelines wiretapped? You cant know for sure has someone tampered your phonelines (unless you ask phonecompany guys to check it out which will cost you...). If you have reason to believe someone might be doing it, concider all your communications compromised. Never use unencrypted connections, use services like www.anonymizer.com to encrypt all traffic in you www-surfing and be cautious about man-in-the-middle attacks! Also, GSM does provide some level of encryption, a level that just might be enought to fool a hacker next door, but not enought to prevent someone who knows he's job to wiretap and listen all your communications.

One thing is to concider when using a laptop computer: A mask. It is hard to explain (especially since english is not my native language), but you can put a mask on the screen of your computer, that changes the polarization of the light so that human eye cant see anything except pure white in it. When you wear a pair or specially tailored sunglasses, you can, however, look at the screen as normal since they "cut out" the polarity. This means, that people around you that dont have similiar sunglasses (regular ones wont help), wont be able to see what is in your screen, but only you can! Ofcourse, they can still look what you type with your laptop computer, but not whats in the screen! Ask more about this kinda system from computer suppliers or security experts in your local area.

-Markus Jansson

 
     
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