What does CSI stand for? Apparently for “Cell Seizure Investigator”, a specialized USB stick from Paraben that claims to slurp up the phonebook, call logs, pictures, SMS, and pretty much every other type of data from an attached cellular phone. The current $200 model supports only Motorola and Samsung phones but additional models and their accompanying adapters can be glommed on to the CSI Stick in the future.
After draining a phone of its data, the CSI Stick can be plugged into a computer to view the files using Paraben’s obliviously named DS Lite analysis software.
I wonder if there are any phones out there at all that don’t just leave their user data sitting unencrypted or unsecured for anyone that has physical access to the phone. [via Gearlog]
Sounds perfectly innocuous.
You can get a cable for a few tens of dollars at your local well-assorted electronics store that, when hooked up to a computer, does exactly the same.
The only difference is that they’ve made it independent of the computer.
If there’s anything nefarious about this, it is the price.
Joel – in answer to your question about “unencrypted and unsecured”: Blackberry’s handhelds will let you set them to “encrypted”, but it is not the default setting.