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Unhackable Netbooks


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Rule 1: Never, EVER, call anything "unhackable", "hack-proof", "hacker-safe" or "secure". Someone, somewhere, will break it, and if they don't, you can guarantee thousands will be trying.

Particularly if some one literally advertises it as 'hacker safe', any one could walk up with an axe and hack it.

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Secure I would say is an ok term, but really all security does it slow you down, YES all security is just a huge road bump (AES is a 'until the end of the universe' road bump (until Quantum Crypto then is is a 5 second road bump).

So nothing is unhackable just got to have the time.

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Melt it with thermite, enclose in concrete block and bury in the back garden and you come close to unhackable.

i prefer the adamantium route myself, if it works for wolverine it works for me :lol:

On a serious route i was more wondering what tools besides the passive RFID that they were using to so called lock down the netbooks? was wondering if some of our aussie friends of Hak5 has gotten a hold of one of these 20,000 netbooks so we can take a peek?

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i prefer the adamantium route myself, if it works for wolverine it works for me :lol:

On a serious route i was more wondering what tools besides the passive RFID that they were using to so called lock down the netbooks? was wondering if some of our aussie friends of Hak5 has gotten a hold of one of these 20,000 netbooks so we can take a peek?

From reading the article on the AUS site, it looks like the standard TPM stuff you see in the Dell laptops. That, with a bios password, and an always on internet connection could keep folks from screwing with it too much. With the tpm module activated you can't flash the bios without the password, same with the drive, it won't work without the same password.

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It is not "unhackable" as in "cannot be hacked." It is "unhackable" as in "students cannot play games, install their own OS, get into it as administrator, boot linux, etc.".

(My school is getting the wireless rollout this week, with netbooks soon to follow.)

From what our school's TSO said, the netbooks have 2 BIOS's. If one is modified, it is overwritten with the other one, so you cannot change the setting or flash it. They have call-home, and are tied into one of the most complicated and secure systems I have seen in ages.

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  • 3 weeks later...

just schools trying to do anything "unhackable" in general is a joke. My school got taken down by virut last year, well a more evolved version of it, but still. All one would have to do to "hack" their netbook is take out the hard drive, make a backup image of it, install grub, make it boot your favorite linux installer and vuala, you have "hacked" your netbook.

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just schools trying to do anything "unhackable" in general is a joke. My school got taken down by virut last year, well a more evolved version of it, but still. All one would have to do to "hack" their netbook is take out the hard drive, make a backup image of it, install grub, make it boot your favorite linux installer and vuala, you have "hacked" your netbook.

Your school's sysadmin should have been fired then. Short of a zero day exploit, no managed system should get a virus.

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Your school's sysadmin should have been fired then. Short of a zero day exploit, no managed system should get a virus.

I don't know, when I was doing work in China for a Fortune 500 company a managed PC on a managed network got infected. Then again this was in China.

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  • 2 weeks later...

as long as i can remeber my skool has never had a serious virus. my friend was working on some school stuff from his USB Drive and then McAfee poped up saying it had found some sality.gen virus and killed it. i did some research from the log and googled some files. turned out to be webcamXP

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From reading the article on the AUS site, it looks like the standard TPM stuff you see in the Dell laptops. That, with a bios password, and an always on internet connection could keep folks from screwing with it too much. With the tpm module activated you can't flash the bios without the password, same with the drive, it won't work without the same password.

To get rid of this "always on internet" just open the laptop up and take out your wireless card. No more DET to shut it down :D

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im talkin an entire school district. 2000+ computers, servers and laptops, every single one was taken down by virut.

so if you wanna take down novel 6 just use virut XD

So. I used to work for a K-12 school district. 23 locations and over 9000 computers, all networked back to the central office. Either 5Ghz microwave links, gigabit fiber optic or our own leased line dsl. We had a couple localized outbreaks on old servers that couldn't be updated(NT4 server FTW), but it never spread from their sub-domain. I guess having a 90% Apple network helps as well.

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Just like Psychosis said this really ain't "hackproof" as "you can't hack into it or get data from HDD", but it's ideal for school networks where you just want your users to use what you give them without having to worry about them messing shit up.

Good idea and I would be happy to see theys guys employed in my schools network.

EDIT: As it has been suggested you could disable the call home, but then you'd have no internet connection what so ever, this also works in a way as steal proofing (why one would like to steal a netbook for use is another question thou)

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