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Encrypting your hard disk is not safe anymore: iViZ

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CIOL Bureau
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KOLKATA: iViZ, an Indian information security startup offering on-demand Penetration Testing, announced its discovery of a new class of vulnerability earlier this month. This vulnerability allows attackers to steal computer boot passwords and bypass the security of pre-boot authentication software like hard disk encryption tools. It affects general computer users, enterprises, governments and can result in unauthorized access or theft of confidential data. Incidentally, in 2007 the global loss due to data theft is estimated to be USD 40 Billion. 

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'Surprisingly, this vulnerability has been existing for 25 years' says Jonathan Brossard, iViZ lead security researcher and discoverer of this vulnerability. 'Programmers unaware of this have coded boot password feature such that user password is not flushed properly leading to inadvertent text leakage and theft from memory. Even hard-drive encryption does not help here.' adds Mr. Brossard. This vulnerability affects Microsoft Bitlocker on the latest TPM (but not Vista SP1), Truecrypt, Intel/HP BIOS and several others.

"We appreciate vendors like Microsoft, Intel, HP proactively providing fixes to users. iViZ is committed to initiatives making the web safe and conducts research that helps secure organizations worldwide.' said Bikash Barai, CEO of iViZ.

Bill Sisk, security response communication manager at Microsoft, via his email to RedmondMag, encouraged customers to update their systems accordingly.