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Picking Up the Pieces
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."
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.
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
...they were shelling out $8,000-$10,000 for some dude to sit in a room with a couple of cases of crazy glue and a knack for deciphering ink blots...
Crap! my secret's out.
Posting as directed.
This is why sensitive information should be incinerated after it has been cross-shredded.
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?"
I mean, isnt shredding a type of encrypton? And isnt this reverse engineering?
I think ive mispelled every word in here.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
so not only did you not read the linked article, you didn't even read the slashdot article before posting?
Hint: look for the word "cross-shredded"
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
...on a really good television show that had far too short a life.
The Lone Gunmen - Those three 'nerds' from the X-Files; Frohicke, Langly, and Byers. Great guys. Great show.
There was one episode in which a rather critical clue was found in a shredded document; Langly and Frohicke were seen pressing the strips of paper between two pieces of contact paper and then scanning the sheet. A program therein sorted the strips, and matched them up. Voila, un-shredded document.
Great idea. Really.
Informatus Technologicus
But I guess thats why the government always burns sensitive papers.
Although... I remembering hearing about a set of government instructions that once said:
1) Destroy all copies of this document once you have read it.
2) But make a copy first for your records.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
..how much they charge for putting together the pieces of my broken career? Andy Rooney
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.
How long can it take someone working full-time to do the job by hand?
Four cubic feet a year would equal a teacher's salary.
Sounds like the folks in the Giant Black Marker Business stand to make a lot of money then. Ever tried to recover info from a page that's been "Blacked Out"? It's pretty mcuh impossible. It's not a good way to do things when you have 3 million pages of whatever to destroy, but surely technology will soon give us the More Giant Black Marker and privacy/corruption can continue.
Caffeine Good
Or you could flush it down the toilet after you tear 'em up.
DO NOT TRY THIS.
I tried to do this with a teacher's note when I was in 4th grade or so. The ripped up little pieces floated happily around and never flushed.
Maybe it will work with a powerful industrial-strength "sounds-like-an-airplane-taking-off" mechanism but, if you're working with a standard home toilet, you're unlikely to get the results you wanted.
You know they'll have a way to go when they put back the pieces from a New York Deli reciept reading: "2 Kosher ham and cheese on Rye. manZlick"
...in the Air Force we shredded documents on a regular basis. The shredder basically turned the paper into a fine powder. We had to put the resulting powder into black bags "for fear of information being weened from unathorized viewing of the dust through the clear bags the shredded used". I always thought the computer required to piece these documents together would be enormous and would take centuries to simply match one letter from one document. The thousands of documents shredded at one time would take thousands lifetimes and by then the information would be beyond useless.
And you get your red Swingline back, too.
For this reason, I don't throw away shredded papers. I had memory holes installed in my home, a la 1984, and whenever I throw away a paper, all I do is throw it in the memory hole and a vacuum sucks it away and into a furnace that burns the paper until it nothing but dust. I mix it with dirt, soil and fertilizer, and then I spread it all over my yard. The plants love it.
Excellent! Since shredding isn't secure anymore, when are we going to get personal paper INCINERATORS. Put paper in... press button... KAZAAM, 4 foot flames shoot out of the bin.
After the Islamic revolution and the takeover of the us embassy, there was a massive collection of shreaded documents ( not cross shreaded) left in the embassy. They took the time to reconsitute all of them... By Hand!
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
... Arthur Andersen accountants and Enron executives were reported to have pooped their pants upon hearing this.
... this means, for me at least, anyone who attempts to put my shredded documents back together will lose more than they'll be able to gain from me.
Which is the name of the game in cryptography, too -- it's pointless to attempt to decrypt a communication the content of which is less valuable than what you'll spend building a machine to decode it.
Of course, if I were a terrorist, I'd burn my documents after shredding them. No way to reconstruct that. Yet.
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
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
So use the toilet after you've put your papers in and odds are REALLY good that you'll get them all to flush then
UPS Sucks
1. The Iranians, after the US had fled their embassy years ago and forgot to burn the shredded papers, pieced together those documents *by hand*. Maybe the US ambassador wasn't expecting this to happen...
2. Someone should sell this to the German authorities who are trying to piece together the records shredded by the Stasi, the East German secret police. The story I heard on the radio - adapted in the book "Stasiland" - had about 30 people doing the job of assembling the files. The figure I think I heard mentioned was 300 years to finish the job. The thing is, there are people living who wouldn't mind knowing the "facts" contained in those files.
h.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
That link does not go to yahoo tech news it goes to goatse.cx -- bad bad bad
Make sure it's burnt thoroughly then stir the ashes and flush em.
That should work.
For harddisks, I hear thermite, some pots and a big bucket of sand works - the bucket of sand is to stop the molten stuff from going through the drive, the bucket and the floor.
Burn Baby Burn! That way, I can be sure no one goes through my secrets, muha!
This sounds like a cue for an Onion article about a new technique for reconstituting paper from capured smoke.
The idea is make it harder than it's worth to get the information. Having said that, it is very difficult to estimate how hard something is.
----
I'm in the NJ National Guard and the shredder we use puts out shreddings that I don't think could be put back together using this system. When the paper gets shredded it gets curled up on the eges, but since the slices are so small the curled edges overlap and make small rolled up strings. In the curling process the ink on the surface of the paper gets so worn out that flattening them and gluing to another piece of paper would not make the document readable.
Welcome to the land of the free...pay toll ahead...no photography...please open your bag...
i suspect paper shredded in these machines could not be reassembled quite so easily:
http://hsmofamerica.com/level_VI.php
For ultimate security simply shred pages of the printed goatse picture with your other documents. Nobody slowly peicing together you documents would want to stare at that horrible image for that long.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
It would make for a very boring movie:
Computer: Scanning complete. Attempting to reconstruct document.
Computer: "SETEC ASTRONOMY". Please enter [Y] to accept or [N] to continue
Operator: N
Computer: "MY SOCRATES NOTE". Please enter [Y] to accept or [N] to continue
Operator: N
Computer: "COOTYS RAT SEMEN". Please enter [Y] to accept or [N] to continue
Operator: N
Computer: "TOO MANY SECRETS". Please enter [Y] to accept or [N] to continue
Operator: Okay Mother, I think we've got it.
Uh....naah. It just doesn't do it for me.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
I want THAT job!
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Instead of looking at what's printed on the shreds, they should just scan the edges of each shred with a microscope. The orientation of the fibers at the edge would form a signature which could be matched to other shreds like a fingerprint. It would require higher res scanning, but I bet it would give almost perfect results.
I wait a week and send 15 pounds of docs, printed spam and snail mail ads through a tree chipper which is then lit on fire a rolled on the hill to a fast flowing river.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
As a clerk in the forces I was privy to Secret and below, including NATO and CANUSUK stuff, the most secret stuff was reports of incidents in Bosnia/Crotia in the mid 90's, deaths, specific locations of troups etc. It was kind of fun because I would read them in the morning while posting the mail, and then see it in the news the next day. Hope this has been enlightening for you.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
I'm surprised this company hasn't been sued for violating the DMCA because they are attempting to "circumvent a security feature".
The goverment has known and use this fact for over 20 years. The real shredders turn the paper into a very fine powder. If you want references go back to gulf war I. There was the report of a fire on the ship, well that was the shredding room. Turns out when you have an airborn powder a single spark will cause an explosion. (cross refrence grain elevators)
Have fun,
The whole point, is to destroy data to the level of your needs (i.e. risk). Obviously, if you are the NSA or a medical records place you need good shredding, but the whole point (of my linear shredder) is to make it more work for someone to get my data, than it is the neighbor's data. Then the dumpster diving bums will skip me. (You could could regularly start a gasoline fire in your dumpster I suppose, but the cops tend to frown on that activity.)
So I shred and add to the dumpster, with confidence that someone else's stuff is a lot easier to get to than mine.
I should have got a cross cut simply because it fits more pages per canister of waste, the ribbons do not fall and compact nicely like the little chips do.
There are "dusters" which pull the paper apart into dust-like fuzz instead of cleanly cutting them, those gotta be pretty close to being like burning + stirring, as the letters would be disassembled as well as the words and phrases.
I am not really looking for a perfect system, just to do an easy and simple way of reducing of the many ways data can leak out.
[Complaining that shredders are usless because the waitress can get the number is silly, that's like saying you won't patch IIS because someone could always walk by the machine and reboot it with a floppy disk in the drive. Chances are you'll get probes via the web server more often than someone tries to reboot the box while standing there... It's all about risk reduction, do a little bit where the return is best until you reach your ideal risk/work level.]
So shredding is good, just not good enough.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
We wrote a book called, The Washington Connection and the resulting scandal was called Koreagate.
I've scanned the shreds-related photos from "The Washington Connection" for Slashdot users. The link to a thumbnail page of those photos is at: lewisperdue.com/book-covers/washington-conection.s html
The processing power for our operation came from open-source wetware running on carbs and adrenaline supplemented by adequate doses of ethanol. We experienced frequent meatware crashes as the result of overloaded I/O handlers.
I also work in a USAF research lab. Powdering shredders are cool, but only permitted for low level stuff.
Antimatter.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)