That's nice first.... first time I saw it.
Any evidence of it in the wild in the past 8 years, like, you know, actually used once?
Any evidence of it in the wild in the past 8 years, like, you know, actually used once?
By simply plugging in a bootable USB that we made, powercycling the computer [0], and selecting boot from USB in the BIOS we were able to get a memory dump from the computer.
By analyzing this memory dump, we were able to reconstruct the HTML of webpages that were open, and generate a list of password looking strings, which did contain several actual passwords.
I guess this isn't really in the wild, as it was one of our own laptops, but their was nothing stopping us from doing it on school computers to hack into other people's accounts if we wanted to; and, the person whose computer we used did end up changing her passwords.
More importantly, if a couple of highschoolers could turn this idea into a usable exploit, I would be amazed if this was never done for actual attacks.
[0] Most of the time it worked if we manually powered the computer down then up, but it worked consistently when we rebooted from within the OS.
I have heard confirmation of this from friends arrested in the UK (by Scotland Yard) and in the USA (by the FBI). I don't believe they actually witnessed it being done,just that they had what was needed. Though my infosec instructor in university was in the RCMP (Canada) and mentioned hqving done it himself so I'm rather confident law enforcement globally has had this in their arsenal for awhile.