Question Encryption

[triniphen]

Hello new member here,

I need a way to encrypt a hard drive so that someone cant walk up with a usb stick or remove the HD and reformat it elsewhere. Ideas?

 

[ElectrO_90]

Ransome ware?

 

[USAFRet]

For the second part of your question - preventing someone from removing the drive and reformatting it...no, there is NO way to protect against that, besides physical security. Keep it locked in a safe.

For the first part - I'm not quite sure what you mean.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Hello new member here,

I need a way to encrypt a hard drive so that someone cant walk up with a usb stick or remove the HD and reformat it elsewhere. Ideas?

Well,

1. You can't prevent someone removing a drive and formatting it in another system. Though there are case locks and the like. However, they are easily defeated.

2. Encryption will only prevent theft of data if the system is not already powered up and user logged in.

 

[triniphen]

As for phyical security the case will be locked, removal of the lock will tell me if someone's been messing with it. A user will be logged in but with very restricted permissions, can they still mess with the system when booting ?

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Yes, you can disable the USB ports to prevent theft of data via thumb drive, but how do you intend to prevent theft of data via screen captures, using either PRTSCRN or photographing with a cellphone or other imaging device? And, case locks are trivially bypassed without leaving evidence.

 

[popatim]

True story: My shed key works on the pc locks here at work! LoL

As for encrypting the drive, which motherboard, drive, & OS do you have?

 

[Math Geek]

you may not be able to secure every pc in use, but you can secure the hdd by having it on a file server elsewhere with important data on it. so even if a person got into a pc, the drive would not have anything usable on it and formatting it would do nothing of any importance. a simple re-imaging would put it back to working rather quickly.

you can keep it from booting to usb in the BIOS easy enough and with a BIOS password, it is relatively safe.

who are you letting use the system that clearly can't be trusted? if employee's i'd say you need to find some new ones.....

 

[hang-the-9]

As for phyical security the case will be locked, removal of the lock will tell me if someone's been messing with it. A user will be logged in but with very restricted permissions, can they still mess with the system when booting ?

If someone has physical access to the computer and you don't have the system locked down, then sure a person can try to by-pass the security, use another boot media, etc.. If the drive is encrypted they won't get any data out of it, but it may be possible to wipe the disk. If this is some critical sensitive data at a company you should bring in an IT security consultant to setup the protection for the data and system.