The guys at SecurityAssessment.com have been digging into the techniques of tapping directly into memory of a running PC using standard Direct Memory Access (DMA). External peripheral buses such as Firewire and PCMCIA use DMA for fast efficient transfer of data directly into host memory.
Adam Boileau of SecurityAssessment.com has demonstrated how he connected his Linux laptop into the Firewire port of a laptop running Windows XP and accessed its memory to bypass user authentication processes. This how DMA and Firewire are designed to work and is not a flaw in the Microsoft operating system (contrary to the article headline).
