Thinkst is a small security organisation and one of its member recently published a post on their blog regarding the security of an encrypted USB drive. One of his friend lost the password to his USB Freecom Self Encrypted Drive (SED) drive and one of the protection in place was the need to power cycle the hard drive after every 5 bad attempts. This meant a brute force attack was impossible due to the time to plug/unplug the device.

Here comesingenuity, although the author call this a “lame hack”, I actually really like it as he thought outside the box (pun intended). He basically build a new controller to automatically power cycle the drive, and managed to find the lost password after 500 attempts.

I don’t do electronics and am always impressed when hackers use it to bypass security barriers!

The article can be found here as well as a photo of there installation.