Pour Yourself a Cup of Microsoft’s COFEE

I think it's a very windows-specific tool so it cannot be as useful as Microsoft tries to suggest. In addition, uncontrolled availability and use of COFEE is a potential source of danger.

I agree with you, any computer is vulnerable in one way or another no matter what the operating system is. I'm sure the tools may help the semi professional law enforcement hacking into your computer, the real pro labs did need them. What gets me now is there freely available to anyone.

Off the top of my head there is about a $50.00 difference between windows 7 professional and windows 7 ultimate. The only difference between the two versions is the bit locker encryption program included in ultimate, that will work in Unison with the encryption chip installed in some of the newer high end boards.

I've considered buying the ultimate version and encrypting one of my drives for sensitive data and information, since Microsoft has been nice enough to supply the tools to crack this encryption there is no use in paying the extra money for ultimate.

No doubt this tool will help catch some of the bad guys, the real pros know far more than I do, if I was doing something I didn't want them to know about i would not even have a hard drive in my computer, operating systems can be installed on a flash drive, and that's just one example.

So I guess it's back to the old keep the passwords in your head, try and remember where I hid the flash drives with the sensitive information on and which box has what papers in it that I want.

Since my filing system is based on chaos theory by the time anybody finds any useful information I will have long since changed my account numbers, or if I was a bad guy left the country.

I think it's more important that a qualified person does the investigating. The notion of trying to make a dummy-proof (pronounced "average police officer...with minimal computer knowledge") program seems to be a black-box solution where they'll plug in the usb drive and assume the info given is correct which leaves a lot of room for error:

Is it also checking to see if trojans or spyware are the root cause of the active connections or web page histories?

Considering both chrome and firefox (can't speak from personal experience for Opera and Safari) have private/icognito browsing ability it becomes that much tougher for a black box program to figure out.

While it might help a bit in an official investigation by authorities but hardly a concern for someone really trying to hide something.

Disclaimer: I hate criminals, pedophiles and the like and ESPECIALLY the fact they hide behind privacy laws making life difficult for regular law-abiding computer users who have to bend over and accept the frailties of their operating system while a company creates programs to exploit them (seriously...isn't this some kind of conflict of interest??? Selling a 'safe and secure' operating system but also writing software to dig out the dirty footprints?) ...hence I personally use linux and recommend mac along with a healthy dose of [self] education.

I fully agree with you. There is a major conflict of interest. I don't know if you've ever run a PC pit stop test on your computer but you'll be amazed at the information that can be gathered off of your system. Not only general information but right down to the serial numbers of your monitors and board.

In the government's zealousness to catch the bad guys they ultimately have, as in this case now have made it easier for them to break into your system. Not only can the uneducated police officer plug the flash drive into your computer and break the encryption, but I'm sure since the program has been disseminated on the Internet that there will be a healthy black market. Now the non computer geek can get hold of the software and with a quick break and enter get account numbers and passwords

As I said in a previous post the professional forensic labs did not need this program, and the professional bad guys already have several methods to defeat the software.

Ultimately they have potentially supplied the tools for a whole new class of computer criminal.

I've been testing windows 7 ultimate release candidate one for several months now, and I was comfortable enough with the encryption potential to encrypt one of my partitions for the storage of sensitive data, passwords account numbers and other such things, I never got around to entering the information, and obviously their encryption system is virtually useless now.

I use CCleaner to sweep out my hard drive. I believe if I do my taxes and erase the files they should be "actually erased". As for internet histories cookies IPs and the like, I think google can give them whatever they are looking for. My son told me that if I sell my computer to put XP on a new small hard drive and take my old hard drive to the woods for target practice.

Is CCleaner good enough? Should I use Linux and TOR? I write inflamatory remarks to politicians now and then and I don't want to be strip searched at every airport or have my taxes audited every year, because of it.

ccleaner does a decent job of cleaning up stuff but I've always been stumped why something critical, like the registry, being used to store garbage like web histories and stuff like that. "Clearing you history" is one thing but the registry stores stuff like which web pages where typed vs clicked on. I have had to do a bit of forensic hunting myself was quite quite surprised at what can accumulate if you don't clean up regularly...no wonder windoze machines get 'tired' after a year or so of regular use. The slugishness is simply the accumulating crap accumulating like cholesterol in the blood stream. A bit isn't a bit deal but once it builds up too much problems start.

When someone comes to me and asks what to do I walk them through my logic:

Have money to spend and want it to work? Buy a mac.

Have a pc already but don't use stuff like cad programs or games? Install linux. Start with a livecd and see what you think...it's a lot easier than you think. My non-guru/nerd wife suprised me and said she wanted fedora linux on her laptop since she liked how it worked on mine.

Have a pc and specific software that will ONLY work on windows? (accept added since there are thousands of open source programs...many small but a great deal of choice between robust programs that rival most anything you would use on windows.) ...you might need to just use windows...but there are still options [keep reading].

My setup: Fedora linux (version 12 just came out...free, good quality, fast installs, good drivers, lots). For those odd cases when I really need a windows program I use virtualbox (free), install the copy of windows that came with my laptop (since I own it already) and simply boot up a virtual windows machine every 6months or so (seriously...the free open source software that's out there is really good enough this is a very rare occasion).

Yeah, with or without cofee !

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"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct, go figure." Niels Bohr

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"Control your destiny, do care home or someone else will!" -- Jack Welch

Here's an interesting article I just found on a very similar topic...

Microsoft denies it built 'backdoor' in Windows 7

Nothing says "dumb ting" to me like an acronym that misspells a common word. I would be happy if certain law enforcement people would use COFFEE instead.

Our neighborhood watch people told me the police advised us that criminals are basically dumb people who sleep half the day. Easy catch.

Maybe COFEE is good for catching those ones.