Chadeaux
Gold Member
- Sep 13, 2011
- 5,512
- 6,408
- Detector(s) used
- Ace 250
- Primary Interest:
- Cache Hunting
Is your couputer's hard drive shrinking?
A friend of mine does computer repair. I met him a few days ago while looking for a new NIC card for my computer. He was fussing over one of his customers' computers in the shop.
The customer had purchased a new hard drive for his computer a couple of months earlier, which my friend had installed and loaded the OS on the HDD.
My friend had a few 80GiB HDD's still in his shop and the customer, being the cheapskate he is, purchased one for his Dell computer.
Well, the customer's complaint was odd. He bought an 80 gig drive, but he only had access to 40 gigs of storage. He accused my friend of selling him a 40 gig drive for the price of the 80.
Well, upon pulling the drive, it was plain that the drive said 80 GB. So, my friend decided to take a closer look at what was going on. What he discovered was that someone had hacked into this guy's computer and set up a new partition within the space that used to be the original partition. The had just "sliced" it in two.
The hacker was using the hidden space they had partitioned off to hide their stash of kiddie porn on this man's computer. No, he didn't know what was going on --- otherwise he would have understood that the partition could be found.
My friend told me that it was at least the second instance he has seen of this happening in this small rural area (he's also seen several that had the partitions but no files). In both cases the customers were NOT on a wireless connection. They had noticed a big slowdown with their internet connection speeds. The other victim was a 70+ year old woman.
Have you checked your computers' recently?
A friend of mine does computer repair. I met him a few days ago while looking for a new NIC card for my computer. He was fussing over one of his customers' computers in the shop.
The customer had purchased a new hard drive for his computer a couple of months earlier, which my friend had installed and loaded the OS on the HDD.
My friend had a few 80GiB HDD's still in his shop and the customer, being the cheapskate he is, purchased one for his Dell computer.
Well, the customer's complaint was odd. He bought an 80 gig drive, but he only had access to 40 gigs of storage. He accused my friend of selling him a 40 gig drive for the price of the 80.
Well, upon pulling the drive, it was plain that the drive said 80 GB. So, my friend decided to take a closer look at what was going on. What he discovered was that someone had hacked into this guy's computer and set up a new partition within the space that used to be the original partition. The had just "sliced" it in two.
The hacker was using the hidden space they had partitioned off to hide their stash of kiddie porn on this man's computer. No, he didn't know what was going on --- otherwise he would have understood that the partition could be found.
My friend told me that it was at least the second instance he has seen of this happening in this small rural area (he's also seen several that had the partitions but no files). In both cases the customers were NOT on a wireless connection. They had noticed a big slowdown with their internet connection speeds. The other victim was a 70+ year old woman.
Have you checked your computers' recently?
Chad
