Slashdot Mirror
Is Your Banking Information Accidentally On Ebay?
GraWil writes "The Toronto Star is reporting how two Bank of Montreal computers containing thousands, of sensitive customer files were sold to a student who fixes up machines and then resells them on eBay. It seems that the company responsible for scrubbing the disks (Rider Computer Services Ltd.) misfiled the machines in their warehouse and it was assumed they had been erased." It's not the first time this sort of thing has happened.
Personally I have always been a big fan of physically shredding hard drives which have contained sensitive data. Although the risks associated with re-assembling and recovering wiped data from, say, a RAID 0+1 array is pretty minute, the cost in terms of loss of corporate image outweighs the few hundred bucks made by trading in used disks.
Seems like this event makes the case for encrypted HDs -- schemes that render data unretrievable without the proper passwords/biometric signatures/magic hardware dongles. The idea that all our personal records are stored in clear text on thousands of HDs and backup tapes at a myriad of institutions is not too pleasant.
As a purchaser/fixer/collector of old computers, I have seen many a file that some prior owner would probably have prefered I not. Although I, personally, have seen nothing of a criminal nature (or of a nature that would allow me to perpetrate a crime) I know others who have found strange files on old computers. Psychotic diary entries that advocated violence, financial records, proprietary engineering data, etc. all have an odd way of being left on HDs of obsolete machines. If a old machine stops working, few people make the effort to fix it in order to erase data. Systems that automatically make the data inaccessible in all but valid/authorized machine states would ensure the protection of the data.
Although any encryption system can be broken, by social engineering at the very least, it would be better if there were at least some barriers between sensitive data and potentially prying eyes.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
While its fine to scrub hard disk clean of their data when they are working fine, what do you do when the hard disk has bad sectors?
That happened to me 2 years back. A Maxtor HDD went bad. Sent it back to Maxtor, got another one. The replacement turned out to be bad too.
Had to send that one back and got the 3rd HDD.
There was a lot of data on the 1st HDD I sent back to Maxtor.
I checked the Maxtor website for any statements as to what they do with their data but couldn't find anything.
Many people(unless they have 2 computers and know how to deal with IDE pins) will just send the disk to their manufacturers, whether it contains data or not. Scrubbing a disk clean with bad sectors requires you to isolate the bad sectors by partitioning.
If you look at the article no one appears willing to take the blame for it, from the bank itself to its two subcontractors tasked with verifying that data is indeed gone from hard drives.
I find it appalling that the 'computer security team' sent to this guy's house were told to 'seize' the drives when clearly he was doing them a favour. Though they thanked him later and gave him replacement (presumably blank) drives, fuckups like these should have proper ramifications. Along the lines of dismissals.
Figures it was the Bank of Montreal. Those idiots can't do anything right, from paying their then-CEO too much to stupid online banking to hypocritical ad campaigns in 1996. Losers!
In Googling I came across this, which lists voluntary sector computing activities in Canada supported by the banks. Just think what interesting fundraising activities could have been made possible by this kind of donation...
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Do you think your money is safe there?
l
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_817915.htm
I'm too stupid to preview.
Point at the person who's job description says that they are responsible for ensuring that physical hard drives don't leave the bank's premises.
Easy, it's the IT director. Um, except that because it's physical, perhaps it's the non-IT security director. Maybe it's the branch manager. Possibly it's none of the above. Possibly it's all of them.
See the problem?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Physical destruction of used disk drives is not necessary and could in fact engender a false sense of security. Think about it ..... a "secure disposal company" could bake a drive at curie temperature for 24 hours in an alternating magnetic field of varying frequency, strap a hand-grenade to it and drop it down a disused mineshaft, but how can you be sure it's the same drive, or that they haven't made a backup of its contents? If you wanted to get hold of stuff people wanted rid of, what would be a better front for getting it?
..... there are a lot of things they thought were impossible ..... what if someone finds a way ..... Hell, sooner or later someone is going to come up with a scheme for disposing of the air from meeting rooms where secret conversations have been held. The simple scientific fact is that it takes only one overwrite cycle to make data unreadable. You can prove this to yourself using a disk sector editor, but it should be obvious anyway. If the drive could tell a "1 that used to be a 0" from a "1 that has always been a 1", or a "0 that has always been a 0" from a "0 that used to be a 1" with any degree of reliability, someone would already have used that as a capacity-doubling mechanism! It's possible that there might be some difference detectable with a sensitive analogue circuit, since there is a hysteresis loop and there really are the four states I described above. Two overwrites of opposite polarity will force the magnetic media into a known state. Even so, just one overwrite will give someone a massive headache trying to recover the data, because the "used-to-be" data has an inherently high error rate. It's already hard to tell "X that used to be !X" from "X that always has been X" and if the overwriting data is random enough, then it's hard to work out what was ever meant to be what.
Overwriting the drive using software is more verifiable. You de-network the machine, boot it up from a CD, and can analyse the drive contents before starting a wipe cycle. You switch off and back on to prove there is no cheating. Then you can analyse the drive contents again and be sure they are different. The drive never left the machine, but you can be sure the data left the drive.
Whatever anyone may say, remember these "secure disposal companies" are after your money and don't mind playing on your most groundless fears to get hold of it
dd if=/dev/audio of=/dev/hda might conceivably do a good job on a used drive, if you make sure the gain is turned up nice and high and there is nothing plugged into the sound card. Filtered static and power hum are the nearest you're going to get to true randomness.
My drives are invariably thrashed for as long as they work, then get the magnets removed for use in experiments {and wiped a few times across the platters for good measure}.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Sorry, you are all wrong...
a) you have disks silent errors (because error-correcting codes corrected them) that will copy sector data to a reserve sector without notice, that makes your old data inaccessible at software level but readable at controler level
b) you can use high resolution magnetic imagery to recover several rewrites of the same track
c) in my books, a hum is very far from random, it's predictable !!!
Physical destruction is the only reasonably secure solution.
I was consulting at a community bank last spring, helping them getting ready for an IT audit by the FDIC. They were replacing some machines, and I persuaded them to donate the old ones to a local computer group who refurbishes them and places them in schools and non-profits. I could see that their IT policy manual contained nothing about even wiping drives let alone destroying them.
As soon as I got them to my office, I invited the CEO in to see how much customer info his IT department had "donated." He was, of course, shocked. The sad thing is, probably 30 people were involved in that transfer and not one of them had the slightest clue. Another said thing is that the donation fiasco was just one of hundreds of examples of failure to adequately protect the privacy of customer information.
The good news is that the FDIC is taking customer data security very serious and is coming down hard on breaches and potential problems during their IT audits and their Safety and Soundness audits. So maybe it will get better. Except we are talking about humans...
computerlady - a brand new Slash-daughter - alone, but no longer invisible, in the