It was 1943, and an engineer with Bell Telephone was working on one of the U.S. government's most sensitive and important pieces of wartime machinery, a Bell Telephone model 131-B2. It was a top secret encrypted teletype terminal used by the Army and Navy to transmit wartime communications that could defy German and Japanese cryptanalysis.

Then he noticed something odd.

Far across the lab, a freestanding oscilloscope had developed a habit of spiking every time the teletype encrypted a letter. Upon closer inspection, the spikes could actually be translated into the plain message the machine was processing. Though he likely didn't know it at the time, the engineer had just discovered that all information processing machines send their secrets into the electromagnetic ether.

Call it a TEMPEST in a teletype.

Bell Telephone faced a dilemma. They had sold the equipment to the military with the assurance that it was secure, but it wasn't. The only thing they could do was to tell the [U.S. Army] Signal Corps about it, which they did. There they met the charter members of a club of skeptics who could not believe that these tiny pips could really be exploited under practical field conditions. They are alleged to have said something like: "Don't you realize there's a war on? We can't bring our cryptographic operations to a screeching halt based on a dubious and esoteric laboratory phenomenon. If this is really dangerous, prove it."

So the Bell engineers were place in a building on Varick Street in New York. Across the street and 80 feet away was Signal Corps Varick Street cryptocenter. The engineers recorded signals for about an hour. Three or four hours later, they produced about 75% of the plain text that was being processed--a fast performance, by the way, that has been rarely equaled.

I would suggest that this tool is nothing new and once again the defenders are playing catchup.

Microsoft has built a USB thumb drive for the police that scans computer hard drives.

The Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor can be used in police raids to map hard drives and decrypt passwords without shutting the computer down and losing evidence.

The device was shown off at a three-day security conference for 350 law enforcement officials in Redmond, Washington.

"These are things in which we invest substantial resources, but not from the perspective of making money," Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith told the Seattle Times. "We're doing this to help ensure that the internet stays safe."

The thumb drive has 150 commands and can log hard drive activity, check on surfing history and decrypt some passwords.

Microsoft has distributed the device for free since last year, and claims that it is in use by over 2,000 officers in 15 countries.

However, Smith acknowledged that there is a financial upside for Microsoft in giving away the device, since it makes money selling ancillary software and services.

Microsoft has been holding law enforcement meetings since 2006 in an effort to educate police about cyber-crime.

Either that's a coincidence or an intentional quote, either way brightened my work day, cheers

Google is your friend there is a substantial amount of information on this topic out there. Show that you actually did some research before posting.

... hense it's a bit of a mute point.

just study, knock it out, pay your 85 bucks a year, and then go research and learn the stuff the cert is supposed to represent :-)