The way remote wiping works is that it wipes when the machine is booted. I know your going to say butt, butt also
Generally the encryption keys for the harddisk are stored remotely on Twitter servers, the PC has enough that can run unencrypted so it can go ask Twitter for the key to decrypt the rest of the drive, so if your access to the Twitter vpn is revoked, your access to the decryption keys to open the disk volume that contains the rest of the os and data files are also revoked.
So effectively, without a way to decrypt that data, it's effectively random noise.
No idea if Twitter is this secure, but it sounds like they may have been.
The only butt remaining is the people who made copies of data months ago to their local home network while they still had access to the systems. Butt, usually this is monitored and if any employee does heavy scraping of databases the security team is alerts to log and investigate the individual, so if they did make a copy, they will be known about and prosecuted if they release a data dump.
Correct. Android phones also have this function. You can tell your Google account to wipe the device that it's attached to, and on boot it will start its initialization process.
It won't stop all of your data being stolen, but it will make it much more annoying for them if they wanted it. I've never needed to use this function on a functional phone before (I used it when a display died) so I'm not sure if Google initializes intelligently (rewriting data with 0s multiple times to remove any chance for retrieval) but at least it helps drastically reduce your chances of having your data stolen.
Did they all keep their laptops on overnight, or did the wiping begin when they turned on?
Exactly. Finally someone with logic.
The way remote wiping works is that it wipes when the machine is booted. I know your going to say butt, butt also
Generally the encryption keys for the harddisk are stored remotely on Twitter servers, the PC has enough that can run unencrypted so it can go ask Twitter for the key to decrypt the rest of the drive, so if your access to the Twitter vpn is revoked, your access to the decryption keys to open the disk volume that contains the rest of the os and data files are also revoked.
So effectively, without a way to decrypt that data, it's effectively random noise.
No idea if Twitter is this secure, but it sounds like they may have been.
The only butt remaining is the people who made copies of data months ago to their local home network while they still had access to the systems. Butt, usually this is monitored and if any employee does heavy scraping of databases the security team is alerts to log and investigate the individual, so if they did make a copy, they will be known about and prosecuted if they release a data dump.
Correct. Android phones also have this function. You can tell your Google account to wipe the device that it's attached to, and on boot it will start its initialization process.
It won't stop all of your data being stolen, but it will make it much more annoying for them if they wanted it. I've never needed to use this function on a functional phone before (I used it when a display died) so I'm not sure if Google initializes intelligently (rewriting data with 0s multiple times to remove any chance for retrieval) but at least it helps drastically reduce your chances of having your data stolen.