The mobile workforce and hacking (cont...)

Udpate post;

On 6/03 I talked about getting a netbook and dual booting both Windows and Ubuntu. I was willing to swap out drives; being in the habit of days of old that meant having the drive bay with the plastic tray thing and the stack of 5.25 drives.

Nowadays that has been replaced with 8g SD cards that can be purchased for a few dollars a piece (I cannot wait for the day when a tube of them costs $4.99) The old is forever new and we are still running OSs from floppies (in essense, USB stick and SD Cards are just higher capacity floppies).

I knew this netbook thing could be done for some time, it is important to say that this technique isn't "news". Maybe it was a professional obligation to buy a netbook just for this reason. My budget manager wasn't buying as she knows I am on a 12 step for gadget problems. Students kept bringing them in with sh!t eating grins on their faces.

In less than 10 minutes I created two OS swap outs using UNetbootin(1). The major problems arose in getting certain OSs to like the Atom processor and the screen resolution of the netbook display. These are all things that will get worked out.

For the Ubuntu task I used "EasyPeasy"(2) which is optimised for netbooks and worked perfectly on the first try. It auto mounted the partitions on the drive with my netbook allowing access to all of the data. Essentially the only thing that would make this a better solution is if the netbook had two SD card slots so I wouldn't have to give up the one. (I like not having a USB key dangling off the side or having yet something else to carry around and keep track of. Mobile form factors should be as all inclusive as possible or they aren't mobile).

I digress; so what does all of this have to do with InfoSec? If you are asking that question keep reading this blog. This topic will be brought up alot mixed in with the other topics we have planned.

Some netbooks have wifi chipsets that support sniffing(3), but not yet packet injection it seems. Operating systems and tools can easily be stored on mini sdcardsg (the size of your fingernail) and carried around ready to boot on the right hardware. Google "wave" will likely change mobile collaboration forever(4). Skype and so on ..... what I am asking is that you take a moment connect the dots and imagine the possible scenarios..

The only thing left is cheap Internet everywhere all the time, and we all know that is coming one way or the other. Thats enoough for now, I need to change a diaper (not mine), but stay tuned for updates.


(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNetbootin
(2) http://www.geteasypeasy.com/index.php?menu=download
(3) http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/AB945FA1-6A1F-48CD-A12A-B962CB229572/
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=13673
(4) http://wave.google.com/