On Monday 05 September 2005 01:21, Randall R Schulz wrote:
It's good to see that you folks have no real concerns in life and that you must resort to protecting the leftover dregs of your sytem's operation.
If you're dealing with credit card data, it is a concern to make sure they can't be retrieved. Usually, sensitive things are programmatically prevented from being swapped out, such as (well designed) password entry dialogs. But when you deal with large databases, this is usually overlooked, so if you get your hands on a hard drive where such a database system had a swap partition, it is entirely possible that there could be CC data. This could be an expensive mistake I don't know how web browsers handle encrypted sites. I would hope they are stopped from being swapped out, but pessimism makes me doubt it. So if you buy things online, it could be a concern even for your home machine. Although there it would only be one or a couple of CC numbers, so the payoff for a criminal wouldn't be as great as for a payment processing database, so the realistic threat there is probably still only viruses and hackers