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Picking Up the Pieces

Posted by michael on from the all-the-king's-men dept.

ravenousbugblatter writes "The New York Times online ran an article yesterday titled Picking up the pieces that talks about new technology that can recover information from shredded documents. Not only can companies scan strip-shredded paper and recover the information, they can do the same with cross-shredded paper. It comes at a price though - one company charges $8,000-$10,000 to "reconstruct" the information in a cubic foot of cross-shredded material. How's it done? The shreds are glued onto a piece of paper and then scanned. Software then looks for matches (in one case using the pattern of ink at the edges of the pieces) and suggests possible combinations to the operator that can be accepted or rejected."

12 of 529 comments (clear)

  1. Still a good idea... by ajiva · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Shredding your financial statements is still a good idea. It keeps people from going through your trash and getting financial information. Everyone should at least get a straight line shredder and shred everything that they don't use.

    1. Re:Still a good idea... by plalonde2 · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Have you done the risk analysis on this?

      What is the realistic likelyhood of someone pulling your financial information from your trash? It's substantially more effecient to just throw your statements out to the street on trash day under your coffee grinds.

      This tendancy towards living in fear scares me.

    2. Re:Still a good idea... by Rogerborg · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sure, because it takes no time to sort your documents into shred and no-shred, shred them, then empty the shredder into the trash, rather than just lobbing everything in there.

      In a society that gives out credit card numbers as easily as names, it never ceases to amaze me the number of people that assume that their card number has been swiped from their trash rather than from any one of the other zillion places that it lives.

      --
      If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
    3. Re:Still a good idea... by Copid · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I would agree with you, but it depends on where you live. If you're a college student living in on-campus apartments, you should shred your documents. I've seen people dumpster diving for financial information in such areas. The campus police had a hard time staying on top of the problem where I lived. College students are good targets because their trash is frequenly mostly paper, they have to put their SSN on just about everything (at least, they used to), and their trash is almost inevitably full of credit card statements and other financial detritus. Combine that with big, shared dumpsters full of bags like that and you have a prime target. Sure, somebody probably isn't going to grab your specific garbage can in the suburbs, but the likelihood of being a target in some areas is quite high.

      --
      An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
    4. Re:Still a good idea... by IIH · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Sure, because it takes no time to sort your documents into shred and no-shred, shred them, then empty the shredder into the trash, rather than just lobbing everything in there.

      For the same reason that all email should be encrypted to the same level, you should shred everything, not just items that you consider condifential. Otherwise you're doing some of the work of the attacker for him, by sorting out the data into important and not-important.

      --
      Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
  2. Question... by stoney27 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ok I havn't read the story, yet but one quesion comes to mind. How do they handle double sided printing? And if they can't, more the reason to print double sided, besides saving paper.

    -S

    --

    It is said that a child learns wisdom from the parent,
    but the truly wise parent learns joy from the child
  3. This is why by pizen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is why sensitive information should be incinerated after it has been cross-shredded.

    1. Re:This is why by micromoog · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why bother cross-shredding it first?

  4. New proverb: by naner42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Never put all your shreds in one waste-basket.

    --
    Self realization: I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?"
  5. Hm... social engineering! by Monkeylaser · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I don't know about you guys, but this could conceivably make corporate espionage that much easier.

    Companies had better get more thorough in destroying their documentation if their information can still be gleaned after shredding.

    An evil thought occured to me. What sort of things could you glean from microsoft's trash using one of these programs. Any of the open-source crowd on here brave enough to find out? Could make for some amusing reading, those company memos.

  6. Who's paranoid? by arth1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Papers that have been burned are usually readable, as long as the ashes aren't totall crumbled into particles. The burnt ink will have a different shade of grey than the burnt paper. It takes work, but you can reconstruct paperwork quite well from burnt papers. In many cases even easier than shredded paper, as the fragments are larger.

    If burnt until the ashes turns white again, it's even easier -- then the text will often stand out in black on white again, and be directly readable by a human eye.

    What I think would be a good solution would be a shredder with a built-in printer -- it will print random text over the sheet before shredding it, to make the text unreadable even if reassembled.
    If anyone hasn't patented it, it's too late now - I hereby declare the idea public domain and knowledge.

    Regards,
    --
    *Art

  7. Re:Change is coming by multipartmixed · · Score: 3, Insightful

    GBM would be relatively easy to "undo" with access to an appropriate lab. GBM ink is soaked into the paper; laser printing/photocopy ink is melted onto it.

    It might be as simple as finding something which will react with toner to make it fluoresce under UV.

    --

    Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?