You’re the Crime in My COFEE
kooty on July 5th, 2010 | File Under Uncategorized -
Sorry. The line was there. I had to use it. Besides, Valleywag already has the best title for this story: At Microsoft, COFEE serves you — to the police
In latest designed-to-scare-the-crap-out-of-you news, Microsoft has confirmed that it’s developed an innocuous-looking and addictively-named peripheral the size of a key fob that plugs into your computer, vacuums up a copy of everything on that computer, cracks all your passwords, decrypts all your encryption, and just generally does whatever it likes with whatever you’ve got until it’s done.
And it’s giving them away free.
That was the bad news. The good news is, they’re only giving them to the Good Guys.
The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB “thumb drive” that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.
The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence…it also eliminates the need to seize a computer itself, which typically involves disconnecting from a network, turning off the power and potentially losing data. Instead, the investigator can scan for evidence on site.
More than 2,000 officers in 15 countries, including Poland, the Philippines, Germany, New Zealand and the United States, are using the device…
Smith acknowledged Microsoft’s efforts are not purely altruistic. It benefits from selling collaboration software and other technology to law-enforcement agencies, just like everybody else, he said.
Well, that should all make us feel better, no? After all, the police hardly ever lose anything important.
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