Give me a break! Any professional cyber-theft trained in counter-measures can prevent the system from being wipe by a third-parties like BackStopp.
A basic counter-measure would include carrying a screwdriver that would allows the theft to remove the laptop's hard drive. After removal the theft can mount the disk on a secondary controller on a computer with no network connections (wired or wireless) to read the data. There are more advanced trade craft measures that can be performed to shield the stolen laptop from being wipe remotely without removing the hard disk...
The bigger question is how the company BackStopp can prove that the stolen laptop hard drive was really wiped.
SLAs should be used to punish BackStopp for failing to wipe the stolen laptop in a reasonable amount of time.
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Luckily the concept of
Luckily the concept of profressional training has not reached 99% of thieves, even the ones that carry cyber-screwdrivers.
Until it does, products like Backstopp from the company, Viruity, will provide a useful, er, backstop where a laptop goes missing.
Meantime your company can bury its head in the sand and wait for the perfect solution (which is don't buy computers?).
Luckily the concept of
Hence the statement, its not a replacement for encryption but to be used in conjuntion with encryption. However assuming the laptop cannot boot without the encryption passphrase\token what is the value proposition of this product?
It brings a loss to a conclusion
You're the boss of a government department and one of your laptops went missing yesterday.
You have two choices: you tell your boss it's missing and you have no idea what has happened to it; or you tell him it's missing but can confirm all the sensitive data has been deleted, for sure, and here's the report and posssibly even a photo of the culprit and a map showing where he is.
The former scenario means you lose your nuts and your job. The latter and you are glad you adopted a belt and braces approach.
Pretty useless product, huh?
Meanwhile, Princeton researchers reveal disk encryption flaw
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/022108-disk-encryption-cracked.html
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