iPods used for ’slurping’ network traffic
Posted by emiratesmac on 20 February, 2006
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A U.S. security expert who devised an application that can fill an iPod with business-critical data in a matter of minutes is urging companies to address the very real threat of data theft.
Abe Usher, a 10-year veteran of the security industry, created an application that runs on an iPod and can search corporate networks for files likely to contain business-critical data. At a rate of about 100MB every couple minutes, it can scan and download the files onto the portable storage units in a process dubbed “pod slurping.”
To the naked eye, somebody doing this would look like any other employee listening to their iPod at their desk. Alternatively, the person stealing data need not even have access to a keyboard but can simply plug into a USB port on any active machine.
Usher denies that his creation is an irresponsible call to arms for malicious employees and would-be data thieves, and instead insists that his scare tactics are intended to stir companies into action to protect themselves against the threat.
“This is a growing area of concern, and there’s not a lot of awareness about it,” he said. “And yet in 2 minutes, it’s possible to extract about 100MB of Word, Excel, PDF files–basically anything which might contain business data–and with a 60GB iPod, you could probably have every business document in a medium-size firm.”
