iSmith,

The problems of RAM retention are nothing new - this has been known of for a while. Only recently has proof-of-concept been made public.

It is very dependant on at attacker gaining physical access to a machine soon after shutdown and either being able to freeze the memory or transfer it to a test machine pretty quickly. It would be unlikely an attacker would want to use the original host machine for the memory recovery as some BIOSes clear the memory at system startup and booting an OS, however small, would overwrite some memory.
So, if you're worried about this, ensure you have a second boot partition/floppy/cd/usb that has a memory purge application or sit and wait a couple of hours for the RAM to dissapate fully.

Related, has anyone thought about modding a DIMM holder to provide a voltage and refresh clock in order to transport the memory and have it retain it's content indefinitley? Who needs liquid nitrogen? Maybe this should be in the forensic thread...

I always thought computers were not safe.

Not even to check the EH Net forums?

I can't vouch for the authenticity as I'm too young (thank god) but apparently that's how M$ got NT4 through it's security standards: removed network cables, floppy drives, any IO device (keyboard/mouse/etc.) and locked the door. 100% secure...

Heh... most people don't realize that physical access to a machine... makes it inherently insecure.  If it can be booted... it can be booted onto something it wasn't ment to be, with enough playing around.  That's when I found a public kiosk in one of the buildings had it's USB slots accessable, AND the power on/off button accessable.. I was rather pissed.  Then I realized it didn't go into my LAN, but the LAN of another department... then I wasn't quite so pissed.  But I did make mention of it.