Department of Dell-fense

January 31st, 2007 at 2:55 pm by Mark
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     You won’t believe this

…the Dell rep shows up and goes to work, and all goes well. … As he’s walking out the door, he says “by the way, it looks like the hard drive they (Dell) sent you wasn’t a new one …”

Dell actually gave me a hard-drive straight from the Department of Defense.

     Un-freaking-believable.  This means that, at some point, one of three things occurred:

  • A Dell rep walked out of a DoD facility with a hard drive, ignoring the usual disposal procedures
  • A DoD employee sent their laptop to Dell, ignoring the usual disposal procedures
  • The DoD upgraded a series of leased laptops, ignoring the usual disposal procedures

     A little over a week ago, a law enforcement official called me to hack into a seized notebook.  In under thirty seconds, I found the Administrator account (they had changed it — just like the DoD does), erased its password and reset the account protection on the file system.  I then logged into Safe Mode as the Administrator, deleted the passwords on the client accounts, handed it back to said law enforcement official and said, “Have fun with that.”  I got my $125, and went my merry way.

     Sure, not everyone can do it that quickly, but I know there are plenty of people out there who are perfectly capable of doing what I did.  Distributing Department of Defense hard drives to people with that kind of know-how could certainly be a serious risk to National Security.

     In my book, at least three people need to be held accountable for that kind of screw up.


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2 Responses to “Department of Dell-fense”

  1. Link Right 2 » Blog Archive » My Quiet Life » DoD Hard Drive Says:

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  2. Julie Says:

    That’s disturbing. When DoD and Dell are taking their national security duties seriously, how secure can the DoD be… really? I don’t have a lot of faith in our ability to keep secrets, unless they’re connected to Roswell.