Gadgetory

Picture this: you’re a CEO on a business trip in Moscow or Shanghai. Meeting with suppliers and showing off specs for the hot new hoverboard on your laptop. Once you're done for the day, the suppliers want to get a drink so you leave your laptop in the hotel room and go downstairs. When you come back everything looks fine. You go to sleep get on a plane and go home. What you didn’t realize is, in the hour you were gone, those suppliers bribed a maid to copy your hard drive and plant a virus on your computer. By the time your hoverboard goes into production, they’re selling a counterfeit version on the black market. It’s called the Evil Maid attack, and it’s one of the hardest things to defend against. You can encrypt your laptop, but the maid will just plant a password-catching virus. You can run virus scans to root out the infection, but you’ll have to type in your boot password before you run the scan. It’s just really hard to defend against an attacker who has physical access to your device. A company called Metasensor has a novel idea about how to protect against that attack. When you put your laptop down, you put a sensor on it — and if anyone moves it, you’ll get an instant alert on your phone, so you can rush back and catch the maid in the act. It won't stop her from planting the virus but you'll know about it. It would work for bigger devices like servers too, or anything you don’t want tampered with. The company’s still crowdfunding, so there’s no telling how well the final version will actually work, but the next time you’re protecting trade secrets in hostile territory, it might not be a bad idea to bring it along. Or better yet, just leave your laptop at home.