...how to suck the brains out of a PC in 3 minutes or less – via sharp-ideas.net
The Scenario
An unauthorized visitor shows up after work hours disguised as a janitor and carrying an iPod (or similar portable storage device). He walks from computer to computer and "slurps" up all of the Microsoft Office files from each system. Within an hour he has acquired 20,000 files from over a dozen workstations. He returns home and uploads the files from his iPod to his PC. Using his handy desktop search program, he quickly finds the proprietary information that he was looking for.
Sound far fetched?
An experiment
I conducted an experiment to quantify approximately how long it takes to copy files from a PC to a removable storage device (iPod, thumbdrive, et cetera) if you have physical access. The quick answer: not very long.
I wrote a quick python application (slurp) to help automate the file copy process. Slurp searches for the "C:Documents and Settings" directory on local hard drives, recurses through all of the subdirectories, and copies all document files.
Using slurp.exe on my iPod, it took me 65 seconds to copy all document files (*.doc, *.xls, *.htm, *.url, *.xml, *.txt, etc.) off of my computer as a logged in user. Without a username and password I was able to use a boot CDROM to bypass the login password and copy the document files from my hard drive to my iPod in about 3 minutes 15 seconds. (more... including a free "pod slurping" program you can try yourself!) (much more)
