Collar Bomber Gets Owned By Word Metadata & USB Drive

 Collar Bomber Gets Owned By Word Metadata & USB Drive

There were other more technical and probably relevant stories to report on today, but for some reason I just found this story very odd and strangely fascinating.

Now here a strange case, a man climbs into a young girls bedroom in the middle of the night, threatens her with a baseball bat and then chains a bomb to her neck. His random instructions include e-mailing to a Gmail account and he leaves a ‘soft copy’ version of the ransom note on a pen-drive with the girl.

There are plenty of metadata extraction tools such as Metagoofil and The Revisionist. And well even without those, after recovering the file you can just open it in Word and view the metadata.

I’m guessing this Paul Peters chap wasn’t so familiar with wear levelling and metadata. He should have known better, and well he was doing this for a ransom..so really he should have just bought a new pen-drive for the job.

But as we know well, these people don’t think like we do – that’s why they end up in the news.

Well there you go, an interesting mid-week story – not entirely sure what is going to happen to this guy. Doesn’t seem like a really strong case for extradition – he just seems like a complete nutcase.

He had a decent enough idea for extortion I suppose, just a really poor execution. Perhaps he’s been watching to o many Hollywood movies where these things seem really easy and nothing even goes wrong.

BTW if any of you readers out there see any cool new tools/techniques or news tidbits that I may have missed, I always welcome a heads-up so just hit me up on the Contact Page here.