Not-So-Clean Hard Drives For Sale

Saeed al-Sahaf writes "The Register is running a story about a security consulting company that as part of a study bought hard drives and laptops on eBay, and then was able to recover highly sensitive data including customer databases, financial information, payroll records, personnel details, login codes, and admin passwords for their secure Intranet site. This is a bit scary considering all of these drives were supposedly formatted and sold for surplus by major companies (although few of us actually use the multiple formatting standards of the DoD). Looks like it's hardly necessary for crooks to get at your private information, although I sure industrial espionage spooks have probably done this for awhile." Shades of the recent post about recovering sensitive contents from swap partitions.

Comments

Low level it.

[jbardell]

Is a low level format really all that hard to do?

Re:Low level it.

[crackshoe]

Dumpster diving ( just doing to my local dump and pulling shit from the stack of electronics) i've gotten social security numbers, credit card data, grading data from various area High Schools...

Re:Low level it.

[ace123]

$ cat </dev/zero >/dev/hda
$ ls
bash: ls: command not found
$

Why did ls stop working?

What? hda means my primary hard drive? Why didn't you tell me before?

Re:Low level it.

[kistral]

No, because these days you're not supposed to do the low-level formatting yourself. That's done by the manufacturer.

Re:Low level it.

[Mycroft_VIII]

Well that depends on what you mean by 'low level format'.
Re-formatting ata hard drives at a truly low level can mess the disk organisation in ways that seriously degrade performance.
If your referring to a 'full' format with does more than the 'quick' format that mearly marks the drive as empty, well it's easy, and of very little use in this case.
Simply writing zeros to every location on the hard drive that stores data doesn't completely erase the data. That is the magnetic field of the bits are not set at exactly '0'. Slight variations in the magnetic material, write head field strength, and positioning all contribute to increase the odds of data being recoverable.
One way to improve your odds is to repeatedly write a series of 1's and 0's to a location to help average out these variables as well as use the hysteresis(sp?) effect to 'degause' the location, this is what 'shredder' programs do (the ones that aren't crap).
Some programs even go so far as to not simply write 11111111 then 00000000 over and over to the same byte, but to use other patterns so that the fields of niegboring bits add to the deguas effect in destroying the data.
At one time (and probably to this day) the US DOD specs used to require a certain number of passes of 0 and 1 bits followed by the writing of a specific bit pattern before a hard drive was considered to have been properly erased.
And yes each pass does put a little wear and tear on the drive, not enough to worry about unless your 'shredding' the drive quite a few times, but still worth noting.
The number of passes used and what if any special patterns are used determine the amount of effort it would take to recover the data, kind of like key length in cryptography. Adjust paranoi settings apropriately. (note: the anology is imperfect as hell, 1024 might be a mediocre key length, but thats enough shred passes to noticeably shorten drive lifespan.)

Mycroft

Re:Low level it.

[mrjackson2000]

so instead of fixing a drive thats realy screwed up by doing a llf i should send it back for an RMA? doesnt sound like the best solution to me

Re:Low level it.

[teknokracy]

What about in OSX (and in other OSes, i assume) where you can write data randomly over the drive several times? I would think that would eradicate any data since anything getting recovered would be random data!

Re:Low level it.

[mwilliamson]

There is a good program called DBAN available from dban.sourceforge.net which is linux-based boot disk that does a good job overwriting to at least one of the DoD specs.

Re:Low level it.

[mackman]

Properly shredding data on disk requires writing known values that also set the ECC bits to all possible values. That requires knowledge of the ECC being used on the disk. Many disk scrubbers actually write so many known vlues because they are attempting to catch all of the common ECCs.

Re:Low level it.

[BhAaD]

$ cat /dev/hda $ ls bash: ls: command not found $

Thats fundamentally wrong, if you did that, you would get 'Permission denied."
On the other hand...

# cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda1 # ls bash: ls: command not found

Will definately kill your system
Notice the # instead of $ :)

Re:Low level it.

[Prendeghast]

Gotta watch out for those pesky journalled filesystems though! I don't think a typical shred program does anything useful on an ext3 filesystem, for example. IIRC you can't be sure that you are really overwriting the physical location of the the orignal data (especially if the file has grown over time) and the journalling will (presumably for files below a certain size) just optimise away the intermediate disk writes and just write the final bunch of 0's ...

I guess you really need to repartition the drive using non-journalled filesystems only and shred all the free space.

Disclaimer: I don't claim to be a fs expert - I just remember looking for a shred application a few months back and being dissapointed that none of them worked with ext3.

Re:Low level it.

[Jason1729]

At one time (and probably to this day) the US DOD specs used to require a certain number of passes of 0 and 1 bits followed by the writing of a specific bit pattern before a hard drive was considered to have been properly erased.

I find it hard to believe the US DoD is this lax on security. I used to work for the Canadian government, and we had to hammer a nail through the drive a certain number of times "according to the specs" to consider it properly erased.

Re:Low level it.

[TexasDex]

Information recovery tools work by subtracting the current pattern of bits from the magnetic reading that the drive outputs. The previous bit pattern generally masks any small variation in the signal, but when that is subtracted from the signal you get a clear pattern of what the old data was. Then you can repeat the trick for a total up to 6 times. Beyond that, the basic noise in the system and the uncertainty of the signal strength makes it impossible to determine the bit pattern.

For this reason, I believe the DOD reccomends writing random data to the disk 7 times, to guarentee that it is destroyed.

Remember, however, that any overwriting makes it impossible to recover data except by special means far beyond that of a normal file recovery program. Tools that recover data after it has been overwritten are not easy to make, and I'm not even sure that they would run on computer hardware. It's possible that such recovery would require special ATA firmware, or even replacing the hard disk firmware.

I'm not an expert, but that is what I've been able to grok from casual reading on the subjectt.

Re:Low level it.

[Anonymous Coward]

For this reason, I believe the DOD reccomends writing random data to the disk 7 times, to guarentee that it is destroyed.

I can verify this, at least insofar as I had a program that used to do disk wiping and it said that 7 pass was "DoD wiping".

That shit takes forever.

Re:Low level it.

[Artifakt]

A few years ago, DoD spec for erasing info classifed "Confidential" was a minimum of seven passes with varying strings of 1's and 0's. DoD "erasure" for a drive that has held "Secret" data involved opening the case and applying a power sander to each surface until ALL the magnetic media has been sanded off, or in a combat situation where the destroying authority was prepared to sign that time was absolutely critical, thermite or white phosporous grenades. I don't remember offhand what the spec was for Top-Secret, as I never had to know that one.

Re:Low level it.

[karit]

The British just grid the HD up into dust. Then lock the dust away incase someone wants to make the dust back into a HD and read the data.

Re:Low level it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if some AC on Slashdot says that a program that s/he had said it was so, that's good enough for me!

Re:Low level it.

[Jason1729]

This was non-military though it was confidential data (personal financial information about citizens).

Re:Low level it.

[Mycroft_VIII]

Well I imagine random data would probably be 'good enough'.
The use of specific patterns, especially alternating 1's and 0's, is to take advantage of known effects such as degausing. There is also the matter of modern hard-drives and ecc data that a poster below kindly pointed out. My last dealings with such data-erasure techniques was a few (8-10?) years ago. My appologies for not pointing out that my info might be a tad dated.

Mycroft

Re:Low level it.

[Anonymous Coward]

For Top Secret, you apply thermite to the sander and sell the HD on eBay.

Re:Low level it.

[Mycroft_VIII]

Good point. Last I studied the subject was some time ago and I haddn't given much thought to the improvements in hard drive tech since then. You could still get, if you searched hard enougn, mfm and rll drives, though they were in the same category as sub5 gig intenal ata hd's are today.
I really just wanted to give the poster above me a clue, not really a detailed explanation. But I really should have pointed out I was running on old knowledge. Ecc codes could be fairly significant, especially with a determined opponent or marginal situatuion.

Mycroft

Re:Low level it.

[OrangeGoo]

DoD 5220.22-M, 1995. This is probably outdated by now, but the standard at that time was to overwrite all addressable locations with a single character to clear the disk, or overwrite each address with a character, its compliment, and a random character to "sanitize" the disk.

Note that these procedures only apply(ed) to every-day harddrives, not anything containing sensitive information. For the drives with classified information, 5220.22-M gives you a list of things you can do: "Disintegrate, incinerate, pulverize, shred, or smelt." There is no acceptable method of sanitizing a disk with classified information on it.

And for the poster below who said that overwriting the data seven times would guarantee that the data was gone... not true, though the data is almost certainly out of reach for the average Joe. NSA is by no means the average Joe, of course, but they have successfully recovered data from a drive that has been overwritten at least a hundred times.

2-cents

Re:Low level it.

[Odin's Raven]

Gotta watch out for those pesky journalled filesystems though! I don't think a typical shred program does anything useful on an ext3 filesystem, for example. IIRC you can't be sure that you are really overwriting the physical location of the the orignal data (especially if the file has grown over time) and the journalling will (presumably for files below a certain size) just optimise away the intermediate disk writes and just write the final bunch of 0's ...

I've no clue about handling other journaled filesystems, but the solution for ext3 is pretty straightforward. Remember that ext3 is built on top of ext2, and that you can always mount an ext3 filesytem as ext2 -- there's no journaling done when it's mounted as ext2, but that's actually desirable in this case. So the procedure for shredding files on an ext3 filesystems is to first remount the ext3 filesystem as ext2, and then shred the files you want to get rid of. While mounted as ext2, there's no journaling going on to interfere with things. Once you're done shredding, you can remount the filesystem as ext3.

Re:Low level it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on the value of $PS1. In bash, if $PS1='$ ' then that would be the case. If $PS1='\$ ' then you are correct.

Re:Low level it.

[Cramer]

If the drive needs a low-level format, it SHOULD be sent back. A modern hard drive should never need a field reformat within it's design lifetime.

(If you disable thermal recalibration on the drive, you'll get what you asked for. I don't know if you can even do that anymore -- "AV" drives used to have that as an "option" for bursts of increased speed.)

Re:Low level it.

[Awptimus Prime]

Yeah, back about 20 years ago I got so much stuff doing the same thing. My friend and I had a large moving box full of floppies we recoverd, stacks of drives, old backup tapes, credit card numbers, SSNs, vendor statements and account numbers, complete and functional PCs, etc.

For others who plan on trying this out: Don't worry, dumpsters for your average company is clean with no gross shit in it. Oh, and regarding the police.. Wear nasty looking clothes.. I mean, really look like a dirt bag. If you go looking like geekboy from a middle income family, you'll get a trespassing charge against you. If you look like a rat, they will leave you alone. We only had a couple of run-ins with the cops and tenants. They all went pretty well, as we said we were looking for things to sell at the pawn shop.

The key, I have found, when performing a social hack is to always pretend like you recognize authority. Cops will quit caring about pointing out your trespass, real fast, when they manage to get a self-esteem boost by picking on a poor person. The little guilty voice in the back of their head will say "Leave the poor slob alone.. AlooOoone!"

Warning: This will not work if you park your new Volvo next to the dumpster. Park around other cars, if there are any, and be prepared to abandon your vehicle a few hours if you are told to leave by the cops. Oh, and get some strong fabric laundry bags to carry your loot.

Re:Low level it.

[danielrose]

I believe the problem is that the journal still exists, after shredding the file content. Ie the file contents are shredded, but journalled entries for file creation still exist, thus unless you create the file while the fs is mounted as ext2, you still have the problem..

Re:Low level it.

[danielrose]

It is still possible to recover data from a physically damaged disk which will no longer work in a machine.
Data can be obtained from the undamaged (or less damaged) portions of platter, which is usually still a lot of the disc, of course this requires MUCH more low level tools than overwriting with data. Best effort is 25 overwrites, combined with a large nail.

Re:Low level it.

[Crizp]

One could always use this

zap!

Re:Low level it.

[DigiShaman]

I just hope taking shots (diabetes) doesn't throw their needles in the trash. One prick and your life could be over. I dunno, I guess I just freakout over shit like that. God only knows what you'll find in a dumpster. Last think I want is HIV or some nasty cuts from broken glass or metal shit.

Re:Low level it.

[DigiShaman]

It is impossible for the consumer to truely do a "low level" format as that would wipe servo data tracks. Also, servo data is for the most part on it's own platter. So when you run those low level format utilites, your really just running a "mid level" format. I will write 0s to the entire data BUT anything pertaining to the servo data.

High level formats are done when you setup a file system with a full or quick format.

Re:Low level it.

[DMUTPeregrine]

AFAIK the type of disk reading you are describing requires taking the platters out in a clean room and installing them into special equipment. Normal hdd heads simply can't get the resolution required for 6 passes. (If they could, then they wouldn't have the write errors they do.)

Re:Low level it.

[slimsam1]

Diabetes, either type, cannot be spread to another person by blood contact.

Re:Low level it.

[Kreigaffe]

Wow, I love that.

A prescribed approach to hitting something. Hard.

Personally if I ever had to wipe a HD out, and I mean OUT, I'd probably start out with the biggest magnetic fields I could possibly find, and I don't even know how big that might be. Maybe I'd make a van de graf machine and blast it a few times, though that would probably leave some info intact.

Honestly.. why take a gentle approach. Data is recoverable because the strongest 'push' is the first.. and each gets 'softer'.. very approximately. So don't keep using that same force.. whap it with an electrical charge like it's never seen before.

Honestly probably just a very very severe EM field would be enough. Make a giant motor or something, that you can slide the platters into.. or put them in as part of a big honking transformer..

I'd think, at least, that something extreme like that would be enough to rip anything useful apart, but you'd probably have an easier time of things just melting them.

Or honestly if you had a sledgehammer.. and a very hard surface, very hard.. hit it, a bbuuunch. hit it till the platters get too hot to touch, flip 'em, hit them some more.. i bet that'd be hellishly fun.

Re:Low level it.

[crackshoe]

most diabetics i know use sharps containers or gallon jugs to hold their used needles before they're properly disposed of. i also make a point of gloves, heavy shirt or hoody, work pants, and boots when diving.

Re:Low level it.

[Anonymous Coward]

err... AIDs and other diseases can be spread by needles though. i guess it would be a good idea to wear thick gloves. ditch em back into the dumpster when the police arrive. (luckily it will be dark enough that they might think you picked them out instead of brought them along)

Re:Low level it.

[devilspgd]

Are we talking about deleting a file, or wiping a drive?

If you're talking about wiping a drive, switch to FAT then run all the tools you want. If you're looking to not wreck an existing drive, just remove SOME data, aren't there defrag APIs which can ensure that you're writing to a logical geometry which is known in advance?

Re:Low level it.

[devilspgd]

After all that, and only one large nail? You could do a lot better then a single nail, start with a magnet from a subwoofer, or a disk sander.

Re:Low level it.

[0x0d0a]

Last think I want is HIV or some nasty cuts from broken glass or metal shit.

Phone handsets or doorknobs are generally *far* worse from a sanitary perspective than just about anything else. All the communicable respiratory diseases have been nicely cultured on the doorknobs by people sneezing on their hands and then operating the knob.

Heck, your ancestors survived tromping around in the mud, barefoot, getting stabbed, clawed, bitten, stung, and so forth. You have an immune system and regenerative abilities that are awfully tough to muck with. Now, *cars*...*cars* are scary. Not many people die each year from scorpion bites, but tens of thousands of people die each year from auto accidents in the United States. And you probably have a road out right in front of your house!

As Neal Stephenson put it -- you're a stupendeous badass. You come from a long line of stupendous badasses. Anything that wasn't a stupendous badass is now dead.

Re:Low level it.

[Artifakt]

Right. Anything with any person's social security number included is confidential in goverment terms. So are employee evaluations and anything remotely medical, like who's being counseled for being overweight, or legal, like who has or hasn't got a will on file. I've worked government and industry, and, while there are some businesses that take both employee confidentiality and the general public's privacy seriously, and I've been glad to work for a couple of them, most people have no idea how much of their government trys to do the right thing, or how many businesses just don't give a damn.

Re:Low level it.

[Anonymous Coward]

And let's not forget about Dihydrogen Monoxide. That stuff is everywhere and very lethal to inhale.

Re:Low level it.

[robslimo]

In Windows, the later versions of cipher.exe support the /w option to "wipe" unallocated filespace. It apparently writes 1's and 0's alternately to at least keep the majority of people from being able to recover anything from a volume.

Re:Low level it.

[binary paladin]

My friends and I take our old drives out for target practice. Some .357 and .308 usually do the trick. If someone can get my chat logs off of that then more power to them.

That's what I call a format.

Re:Low level it.

[teknokracy]

I just had an idea: If the data is so incredibly vital, if the data would cost a company millions if released, if the passwords would let anyone gain access to the system... why not just lock up the hard drives in a vault, or perhaps physically DESTROY them. After all, the cost of not selling those drives compared to the prevention of secrets/passwords being released is minimal! Then again, if someone wants your data, they'll get it by any means possible, so you are screwed either way.

Re:Low level it.

[pilgrim23]

There is another way, a cleaner way, and a safer way to get older computer gear but I will be d****d if I will reveal my motherload source! I too have picked up machines with all sorts of sensitive data. By the way: One drive I recovered was loaded (about 12gbs) with mp3s. Most were things of no interest to me, some though were to my taste and I kept them. Will the RIAA bother me over such? I also picked up some used albums; same source. Are these also something I should never listen to? Tapes? Eight Tracks? How about recovered software? older books? What is the disposition of media AND ITS CONTENT if either recovered from the trash or purchased used (yard sale, thrift store, flea market etc)?

Re:Low level it.

[Lancer]

Phone handsets or doorknobs are generally *far* worse from a sanitary perspective than just about anything else.

No kidding! I once read about the population of an entire planet that was killed off due to a particularly nasty virus contracted from a filthy telephone, embarassingly after they had sent off all of their telephone sanitizers to colonize a new world.

You can't make stuff like that up...

Re:Low level it.

[harrkev]

What about a diabetic with HIV? Chances are low, but not zero.

Re:Low level it.

[harrkev]

I have an easier way to wipe a drive. It requres a torx screwdriver and a bulk eraser. Works every time. And yes, I have done this. But the HD was already flakey and destined for the trashcan.

Re:Low level it.

[DigiShaman]

Correct. I simply used diabetes as a reason for the use of needles. Hence, used needles *might* contain HIV should the diabetic be HIV positive. Hell, they could be a smack user for all I know. But if there are needles around, that's a major bio-hazard. But hey, if dumpster diving is worth the risk to you, then all the more power to you.

Re:Low level it.

[carlos_benj]

It's OK. You can tell me. It'll just be between the two of us....

Re:Low level it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except hard drive platters are fragile to the point of being extremely dangerous, so you can't do any creative blacksmithing with them. Lousy coasters too, they conduct heat very well and fingerprints *never* come off.

Re:Low level it.

[Humpinate]

Re: Top Secret
Willy Peter does the trick, so does immersion in the right local...the Mariannes Trench.

Re:Low level it.

[Max Threshold]

Right. Because after I shoot up heroin, I always go behind the local computer store to dump my needles.

People who use needles for medical reasons are gernally responsible enough to seal them in a red plastic container before disposing of them. I wouldn't dive a residential trash bin, but business class trash is likely to be pretty clean. I'd be more concerned about ordinary cuts and bruises than some diabetic pencil-pusher's dirty needles.

Re:Low level it.

[nyseal]

I guess the disposal method for top-secret must be thermo-nuclear. I knew there was a reason for all that testing.

Re:Low level it.

[supertopaz90]

A CS professor of mine told us this story: They were selling off old machines from the lab (that they undergrads use). A couple weeks later, they got a call from one of the buyers who wanted to know the password to root, so that he could use the machine.

Ever since then, the policy has been that the hard drive is removed from old machinces and smashed with a hammer; the system is sold without a hard drive.

This was a few years ago; I think they just hadn't thought out the implications of selling off the machines (students vitals, account passwords, etc).

Re:Low level it.

[anonymous cowherd (m]

Nuke the drive from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Re:Low level it.

[AwPhuch]

Nope...
I have a completely automatic dod standard wipe disk image I got from Darik's Boot and Nuke floppy...just pop it in...turn it on...and bam dod standard wipe of EVERY harddrive in system!!
I even made up a quick wipe for when I am fixing to install a os on a fresh hd...wipe it clean then partition.

http://awphuch.no-ip.com:1079/dban/

Hope this helps

Brian
AwPhuch

Oh no...

[Snad]

To whoever bought my old hard drive on eBay, those pictures were all for research purposes only.

Sincerely
Peter Townshend

Re:Oh no...

[Sk8SuX]

and they all said they were 18

Re:Oh no...

[erucsbo]

Next time you might get more for it by advertising it as a hard drive with hidden flash.
BTW, try doing a data recovery on some of the little flash drives that get given out as promos. A few I've seen look like they've been used by the sales staff, before being given out to clients :-)

Re:Oh no...

[Ateryx]

I swear on my life, every hard drive I've gotten from a garage sale has had some sort of horse porn on it.
After the 4th out of 5 harddrive I was scanning had horse porn I just figured it'd be better to not look anymore.

Re:Oh no...

[Txiasaeia]

Perhaps you should move away from Wisconsin, then!

Re:Oh no...

[swschrad]

so stop putting that horse porn on the drives, then. besides, ( very old joke ) all the pretty horses are in Kentucky, anyway (/ very old joke )

Re:Oh no...

[Anonymous Coward]

I swear on my life, every hard drive I've gotten from a garage sale has had some sort of horse porn on it.
After the 4th out of 5 harddrive I was scanning had horse porn I just figured it'd be better to not look anymore.

I remember my first laptop, a 386sx with vga b&w screen. It was so spiffy I wanted some pictures to show it off, any pictures would do. This was the late 1980s and the only gifs you could find on local BBSs were porn. So I got some porn. In dennies I was asked if my computer could display pictures. I said "Sure here's an image of a woman having sex with a horse". The waitress was so impressed, the quality, the detail, yet was somewhat disusted. So not to apear sexist, I showed here another one "here's a picture of a man having sex with a horse". She asked me if I had some pictures without horses, I had to say "No, the only pictures you can get for computers are of people and horses having sex".

Re:Oh no...

[mikael]

Scary stuff indeed. I had to take our pet our local vet. Very friendly girl, but she had all kinds of animal porn all over the walls of the waiting room; horses, cats, dogs, gerbils, even budgies!!! Even the screensaver of her PC was showing animal porn. The mind boggles...

Re:Oh no...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for that wonderful story, Mr.Ed.

Re:Oh no...

[prog99]

We bought a mobile phone on ebay and apart from the ex owners contacts it also had his porn collection on it too.

Re:Oh no...

[necro2607]

hahah funniest thing I've read all day, awesome :D

Re:Oh no...

[zonker]

makes me curious why you are buying used computers looking for horse porn... ;P

Hard dives.

[Raven42rac]

You know, there are signs on pools for this very reason.

Re:Hard dives.

[Raven42rac]

Well nevermind, they fixed the headline.

Active KillDisk

[holy_smoke]

http://www.killdisk.com/eraser.htm

Its worth its weight in gold.

Re:Active KillDisk

[kayen_telva]

I second Eraser, or SDELETE for scripting.

Re:Active KillDisk

[afidel]

There is no such thing as a secure deletion. To be sure that data is irretrievable you need to physically destroy the disk, which includes at least chopping up the platters and preferably melting them down. Here's a quote from the definitive paper on data recovery by Peter Gutmann:

For this reason it is effectively impossible to sanitise storage locations by simple overwriting them, no matter how many overwrite passes are made or what data patterns are written.

Re:Active KillDisk

[Ateryx]

Sledgehammer

Guarantees against any fines or any number of years in a federal-pound-you-in-the-ass-prison.

Re:Active KillDisk

[whereiswaldo]

Read the entire paragraph quoted from the article:

Data overwritten once or twice may be recovered by subtracting what is expected to be read from a storage location from what is actually read. Data which is overwritten an arbitrarily large number of times can still be recovered provided that the new data isn't written to the same location as the original data (for magnetic media), or that the recovery attempt is carried out fairly soon after the new data was written (for RAM). For this reason it is effectively impossible to sanitise storage locations by simple overwriting them, no matter how many overwrite passes are made or what data patterns are written. However by using the relatively simple methods presented in this paper the task of an attacker can be made significantly more difficult, if not prohibitively expensive.

So it sounds like if you are overwriting your data in the exact same physical location which it currently exists, it should be possible to make the original copy unrecoverable given enough overwrites.

Re:Active KillDisk

[afidel]

Ah, but with modern disk drives it's basically impossible to be sure that you are writing to the same physical location. The magnetic domains are so small with GMR that temperature fluctuations of just a few degrees can throw off the alignment enough to ensure that complete erasure is not possible.

Re:Active KillDisk

[modest apricot]

Not everyone who posts here on slashdot can lift such a device. It's easier for some users to build a complicated tripod that holds a shotgun. Then, after a terrible "In Soviet Russia..." joke, a system of pulleys and levers fed started in motion by the good sense of a common man causes the trigger to be pulled and the hard drive to be turned into high-performance shrapnel/glitter/confetti.

Re:Active KillDisk

[weapon]

I heared from somewhere that the NSA used a high tech (and cheap) peice of equipment to make sure the disks cannot be read after erasing them called a bullet. they actualy shoot bullets into the platters, to add some random interference

Dave

Re:Active KillDisk

[DMUTPeregrine]

Hmm. Well, I format, change partition type, overwrite the entire disk contents several times, then format again. If I'm really feeling paranoid I install windows, and hook it up to the internet without a firewall or any patches. If there is any data left on it after a day, i'd be quite surprised.

Re:Active KillDisk

[ostiguy]

The parent poster had it right:

basically, the theory is that if the heads are slightly off, the drive may still work fine, but the data is written slightly off as well, such that traces of the data exist due to slight magnetic remnants. this theory thus is that drives must be destroyed to be secure.

most high security orgs feel the same way - IIRC, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police put out a doc for .ca govt usage, and they came up with allowing any non classified PC to be recycled. But they also laid out destruction requirements (how small the remaining debris must be) for classified and higher pcs.

ostiguy

Re:Active KillDisk

[Moraelin]

You do know that virtually every single ATA drive manufactured today has SMART capabilities, right?

Basically, the drive has a little more sectors than it reports to your computer. If the data in one sector starts needing retries to read, the hard drive will automatically copy the sector's data to a one of those extra sectors, and mark the original sector as bad.

This is great for MTBF, because you typically no longer end up with a bad sector in the middle of your valuable database, like in the old MFM or RLL days.

This is absolute nightmare for wiping the data, because a few sectors of old data may not even be visible to your precious wipe-disk utility. Regardless of whether you use 7 passes or 700 passes, those sectors won't be overwritten even once.

I.e., do you _really_ want to take risks? Sure, not much data will be in those sectors, and someone would pretty much need to go low level to read them. But you don't know _what_ is there. It could be a few credit card numbers, it could be top secret information, it could be anything.

And what for? For some $20 on EBay?

Re:Active KillDisk

[CrimsonAvenger]

To be sure that data is irretrievable you need to physically destroy the disk, which includes at least chopping up the platters and preferably melting them down.

I believe I have a copy of the NSA rules on sanitizing hard disks and such around the house. As I recall, you have to reduce it to pieces no more than 0.5mm in diameter.

Re:Active KillDisk

[Twinky]

Actually you don't really have to physically destroy your harddisk, the following command deletes all the data reliably

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=65536

Interested German speaking people should check out c't Magazin 5/2003. They took harddisks with four deleted files and sent them to professional data recovery labs. The first file was overwritten with zeros, the second with a random bitpattern, the third three times with zeros and the fourth three times with complementary bitpatterns.

None of the labs was able to retrieve a single file. If you however try to burn, drown or hammer your drive, chances are good that the data stays intactand can be restored.

Sounds familier

[Bandman]

Didn't I read about this in Jurassic Park?

Re:Sounds familier

[criordan]

It was The Lost World.

Re:Sounds familier

[sindarin2001]

On a completely off-topic tangent, I have no idea how they screwed up such a good book when making it into a movie.

Learn something!! not scaremongering!!

[kiwioddBall]

Perhaps more useful than yet another pointless scaremongering exercise would be for the company that now owns the drives to go back to the companies that they bought them off to find out how they were erased so we could find out how not to do it, and where they were not successful in recovering info to go back to those companies to find out how they did wipe that info properly.
The point is to learn something from it.

Re:Learn something!! not scaremongering!!

[SillyNickName4me]

Not realy, it has been long known that deleting a file doesn't whipe the contents, it just tells the system it can use the space the filed occupied for another file now, and it unlinks the current file from the directory structure.

Actually removing the contents of a fiel is what you need, and tools for that have been around for at least the last 20 years that I remember.

So no, theres little to learn there, wha they seem to want to point out here is that security has a lot more to do with how you think and care about your information then with buying fancy firewalls from Checkpoint and such.

Re:Learn something!! not scaremongering!!

[1u3hr]

Perhaps more useful than yet another pointless scaremongering exercise would be for the company that now owns the drives to go back to the companies that they bought them off to find out how they were erased

From the wording of the story, it's not clear that the drives were erased at all -- it says 'all of had "supposedly" been "wiped-clean" or "re-formatted"', which makes it seem likely to me that this is not some high tech recovery from wiped space, but simply taking advantage of negligence. Other stories have highlighted this as a consequence of outsourcing of disposal to companies which are supposed to do this before selling them, but neglect to. A company shouldn't let a disk off the premises without wiping it themselves -- it's a trivial process, as many other posts are detailing their favorite methids I won't bother. The sad consequence is that many potentially useful machines will now be destroyed out of paranoia and cosntribute to computer waste

Re:Learn something!! not scaremongering!!

[gujo-odori]

In the late 1990s I got an old PC in a LUG raffle.
It had been donated by a company, and had apparently been used by someone in the financial department.

How do I know? Windows and all of that person's spreadsheets and other documents, filled with confidential financial information, were still on it, the disk was totally untouched.

I got their contact info from the LUG and let them know what I'd found and asked if they wanted the thing back, or at least the disk out of it. The response was basically that if I was honest enough to report it and offer to give it back (and I did offer to give it to them; I didn't ask for anything for it, not even the price of my raffle ticket), they trusted me to destroy the data myself, so I could keep it. I didn't go to any great lengths to do that, but I did repartition it and install Linux. I don't remember what became of the PC. The disk eventually died and I destroyed it before disposing of it, even though the information was by then quite obsolete.

A few minor details of this story have been embellished a bit, basically to protect the guilty :-) However, any of the principals in those events would still recognize this story.

For that matter, I bet things like this are common enough that a lot of people who were not involved may nevertheless recognize this story and think it was the one they were involved in :-)

Re:Learn something!! not scaremongering!!

[Tony-A]

find out how they were erased so we could find out how not to do it, and where they were not successful in recovering info to go back to those companies to find out how they did wipe that info properly.

Most likely it's very simple. The disks they recovered info from were not overwritten and the disks they couldn't recover information from were overwritten. A format that operates mostly in read-mode will leave most of the information intact on the disk. I have even FDISK'd, messed around with varying partitioning schemes, reformatting, and to my surprise eventually winding up with the original contents of a partition still readable.

Something as simple as
dd if=/dev/zero of=/def/hda
and let it run until it's finished would be adequate to put the disks into their "couldn't recover information from" category. Still for the few bucks a used drive is worth it seems kinda stupid not to just pull them and pile them up somewhere. This from someone who has a pretty cavalier attitude toward security.

If you're really paranoid about your data...

[WIAKywbfatw]

If you're really paranoid about your data then don't sell your hard drives, even if you have used US DoD-levels of formatting. Duh.

Rather than make a few tens of dollars selling an old drive, take it apart, and burn the platters until they're nothing more than dust. Problem solved.

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[nomadic]

Rather than make a few tens of dollars selling an old drive, take it apart, and burn the platters until they're nothing more than dust. Problem solved.
...then mix the dust with concrete and water, let it harden into several small chunks, charter a ship around the world, and drop each chunk in a different spot in the ocean.

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[Brandybuck]

And then we'll see dupe stories on Slashdot about evil companies that don't recycle their hard drives.

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[Phurd Phlegm]

Rather than make a few tens of dollars selling an old drive, take it apart, and burn the platters until they're nothing more than dust.

"Burn the platters?" What, do you live in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber? They're aluminum, aren't they?

I was looking for a link for oxygen chambers and happened across this link on underwater blast injuries. I figured it was interesting and it kind of goes with the typo in the title.... At least, it seems more interesting than a second article that says "there's data on used hard drives."

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[dgatwood]

The temperature should degauss the data long before the glass platters melt, forget burn....

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're paranoid about your data, then US DoD level formatting (for classified data) is enough. Really. Although not everyone has an $8,000 degausser in their basement.

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they are not aluminum. I don't know the exact material but it's some sort of glass type material. I found this out when I dropped one and it chipped. I then held it in my hand and tried to break it like a CD. It exploded into a million pieces.

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[Nasarius]

"Burn the platters?"

Melt them, rather. I remember reading an article long ago on a Canadian "black hat hacker" kind of site, which had details on how to set up a system where your hard drives would be melted with thermite at the flip of a switch. For the very paranoid :)

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[prockcore]

then mix the dust with concrete and water, let it harden into several small chunks, charter a ship around the world, and drop each chunk in a different spot in the ocean.

Damn. You're the guy responsible for every Adventure game ever.

Now I gotta go collect this guy's harddrive and reassemble it so I can get the Master Sword.

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[Dwonis]

Was that for a regular hard drive? I did that with my laptop hard drive, but I assumed it was unique to laptop hard drives.

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to kill the ship's crew as well, so nobody alive knows the location of the concrete bits

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[relyter]

It would be *much* simpler to whip out your power drill with a 1/4" bit and drill a couple hoes through the drive. If someone tried to spin the drive up, not only would there literally be sections of the data missing, but the loose particles inside the drive would grind the platters and probably destroy the read heads.

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, not so uncommon. I remember when I worked in a *ahem* spook house *cough* that the U.S. government had sensitive cold war data on an old computer hard drive. The device needed to be retired. The method of solution? 1. Melt the device into a giant blob. 2. Grind the blob into small metal shards. 3. Thoroughly mix the bits (ignore the pun if you want) of metal into a large vat of concrete. 4. Assign the local naval reserve to cart the large concrete/metal blob about 150nm out to sea on a dark and stormy night. Drill a series of holes into the concrete. Small concrete/metal fragments as a result of the drilling process may be cast overboard so long as you are past the continental shelf. Fill the holes of the main block with high explosives. Cast the material overboard and when it's at least 350 feet below the surface of the water, detonate. Use sonar to determine any pieces not properly destroyed, and use for torpedo practice. Enjoy!

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[Elias Serge]

Some are metal some are glass. I think the first glass platters were in the IBM GXP60/75 drives. (called "Deathstars" b/c they failed alot). They used a glass platter coated in magnetic material.

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[Blastrogath]

Rather than make a few tens of dollars selling an old drive, take it apart, and burn the platters until they're nothing more than dust. Problem solved.
...then mix the dust with concrete and water, let it harden into several small chunks, charter a ship around the world, and drop each chunk in a different spot in the ocean.

Actually, by mixing it into concrete you're making it stay together and therefore making it more recoverable. Better to scatter it from an airplane into one or more urban areas. (there's more metal and plastic residue to hide among in an urban setting)

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[mlush]

take it apart, and burn the platters until they're nothing more than dust.

on top of the pyro fun, old hard disks are a handy source of ultra strong fridge mangets

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[mpcooke3]

I believe this is what the DOD do with particularly sensitive data, I heard this 2nd hand so I can't confirm it.

They drill a whole into the sealed room containing the servers, large enough to fit an ethernet cable in then they run Blanca on the disks, then they seal up the hole.

The new servers are in a new sealed room.

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[Anonymous Coward]

Assign the local naval reserve to cart the large concrete/metal blob about 150nm out to sea on a dark and stormy night.

150 nanometres!? From the high tide mark or the low tide mark or somewhere else? :)

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[gnu-generation-one]

"Burn the platters?" What, do you live in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber? They're aluminum, aren't they?"

I believe the normal technique is to mix them with iron oxide. You'll need a fuse which burns very hot to ignite it.

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[captnkurt]

"Burn the platters?" What, do you live in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber? They're aluminum, aren't they?

I don't see what all the fuss is about. Mine burns just fine.

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[Obfiscator]

Aluminum is very pyrophoric. If you grind it up into a fine enough powder, it ignites in the air (see this MSDS, for example...sorry, no cool pictures).

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[Humpinate]

LOL !!!!!! You are the SHIT !!!! Laugh, I thought I'd DIE..........

Re:If you're really paranoid about your data...

[danheretic]

If you're really paranoid about your data then don't sell your hard drives, even if you have used US DoD-levels of formatting. Duh.

I work for a university, and we're required to send washed-up systems (including hard drives) to the surplus warehouse, where they're eventually auctioned. Sure, we can destroy the hard disks, but then the surplus warehouse charges us! (Their policy is to charge us for non-working systems, but to take working systems away for free. Pay us? Ha!)

As a cash-poor department in the university, we can't afford to pay to dispose of systems. So we DoD-wipe each one. I'm pretty comfortable with that level of security, but there are some who might not be but be in the same (financially-motivated) situation.

Maybe I should reload all the hard drives with horse porn so they stop looking after they find that...

pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

And you thought your home made pr0n was safe.

-kc

Re:pr0n

[martinX]

My homemade pr0n is very unsafe. Don't try this one at home unless you're a trained professional!

This is why...

[DaHat]

Personally speaking, I've never given away or sold a HD in my life... not that I'm paranoid about what might be on it, I find it a good practice to use em until they die, even if it's only a few extra gigs.

Re:This is why...

[Mycroft_VIII]

I'll second this, even when I get a new hard I usually keep the old one to back stuff up to when I'm putting a new o.s. in. Or when I feel like trying out a new distro (or new version). Plus if a drive dies on me I have spare I can use.
Though is this case I think we're dealing with corporate upgrade cycle here. Usually the corporation sells off a bunch of drive in bulk to cut the cost of the upgrade or company hired to do the upgrade takes the old drives and re-sells them to garner a few extra $$.

Mycroft

Re:This is why...

[Qzukk]

I find it a good practice to use em until they die

Heck, I've got every harddrive I've ever owned here, even the ones that died. Someday I'll get around to making clocks from them or maybe speakers like I saw here a long while back. Recently I had a computer start acting strange on IDE (but with an adapter, the drive worked fine on SATA in that machine) so I went through ALL the old IDE drives until I found one that actually still worked... 650MB IDE drive from Conner, if I recall correctly. That drive exhibited the same issues as well, so I chalked it up to the IDE controller dying, and stuck to SATA.

Re:This is why...

[Anonymous Coward]

I still have a 210 MB Conner SCSI hard drive (rebranded as a Sun drive) that works just fine. It's really noisy, and I think it's 5400 RPM or maybe 4500 RPM. You want it? I can give it to you for free if you think it'll be useful to have around...

Re:This is why...

[Technician]

IF he is interested, let me know. I could ship him a maybe still working 40 Meg 1/2 height drive and a 70 Meg full height drive. ;-) Just send a shipping pre-paid container. I won't even format them first. (no longer have a machine with ISA slots for the controller) Neither drive has been in a machine with personal information or internet connected. I think they still have DOS 3.21 and Red Hat something old.

Re:This is why...

[Cee]

Personally speaking, I've never given away or sold a HD in my life... not that I'm paranoid about what might be on it, I find it a good practice to use em until they die, even if it's only a few extra gigs.

I don't really get this. I've got a 40 GB drive and another 160 GB drive. What use would it be to add my old 2 GB disk? More noise, more heat, more power consumtion.

My practice is that I usually have two disks in my computer. Whenever I buy a new one, I keep the larger one and move the smaller one to my web/mail server.

Re:This is why...

[Cee]

I find it a good practice to use em until they die, even if it's only a few extra gigs.

By the way, you usually don't want to use your hard disk until it dies (well, at least if you care about the data on the disk).

Re:This is why...

[PedanticSpellingTrol]

Whenever I have one that I feel has dropped below the lower limit of useful size, I like to crack it open and recover the sweet juicy rare earth magnets inside. The one I got from my old 513MB seagate was able to hold a sunday New York Times to my fridge. ohh yeah.

Re:This is why...

[DaHat]

True... or you have sufficient redundancy that the death of a single disk does not result in a catastrophe.

Re:This is why...

[pla]

I don't really get this. I've got a 40 GB drive and another 160 GB drive. What use would it be to add my old 2 GB disk?

Simple... Use it as your swap/pagefile disk. 2GB works well for most modern machines, and by the time that seems tight, we'll have started making similar jokes about "mere" 40GB drives.

You might worry that such an old drive runs so slowly that it would actually reduce performance, despite taking a load of your main drive, but I speak from personal experience on this. My secondary machine (ie, my SO's) has 192MB of RAM, with a truly ancient 540MB drive in in purely for the pagefile - Truly amazing improvement in speed compared to putting the pagefile on the C drive. On my main machine, I have a 1.2GB as a dedicated pagefile drive, and while not quite such a drastic improvement (I also have enough memory that it rarely needs to page, beyond Windows' stupid usage algorithm that flogs the disk twice a second no matter how much memory you have/use), it still gave a very noticeable improvement.


One warning, though, don't put an old HDD on the same IDE channel as a DVD burner - Even if it doesn't downgrade the channel to PIO, it will get enough traffic to greatly increase your risk of burning coasters. Again, I say this from experience. :-(

Slashdot Spellchecker....

[Papatoast]

has taken a "hard dive".

Re:Slashdot Spellchecker....

[Brandybuck]

Nobody is this bad of a speller. The purpose is beyond my comprehension, but it can only be deliberate. I'm going to go through past stories and try to crack the code. There's got to be a secret buried in the mispellings...

Re:Slashdot Spellchecker....

[Anonymous Coward]

Rumor has it the editors purposefully introduce misspellings to give the site more of an informal "just regular guys" feel, as opposed to other sites that try to be professional. Much like how they have extreme tolerance for trolls and abuse-the editors have the same sense of humor as many -1 posters, and enjoy having a site that's as much circus as it is serious news. The misspellings do quite a bit to contribute to the atmosphere of senselessness.

Re:Slashdot Spellchecker....

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been working on cracking that code myself. I'm pretty close now.

BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALT...

crap.

Re:Slashdot Spellchecker....

[Tony-A]

Something to do with dumpster-diving?

Seriously, if you don't bother to stop these large security breaches, why even bother with anything else?

Re:Slashdot Spellchecker....

[mdielmann]

Here's the code. Take every letter that is missed, and add it to your message. If an extra letter is added to a word, take a letter off your message. Repeat. If you follow it long enough, you will get the following message: "You are a loser with too much time on your hands." Don't ask how I know this.

not a joke

[real_smiff]

Step1: buy used hard drives
Step2: ???
Step3: profit

let's discuss Step2

Re:not a joke

[JRSiebz]

again, i must thank you for yet another underpants gnomes reference

Similar to MIT students in Jan 2003

[Amgine007]

This reminds me a lot of this story.

Simplified summary of both: buy some hard drives on eBay and you could end up with some cool data!

Re:Similar to MIT students in Jan 2003

[Snad]

buy some hard drives on eBay and you could end up with some cool data!

Of course you are more likely to buy some hard drives on eBay and end up with the entire history of some guy's girlfriend's medical problems in old e-mails, a small collection of old cached Slashdot pages, and some rather naff Flash animations.

Re:Similar to MIT students in Jan 2003

[R33MSpec]

"...Of course you are more likely to buy some hard drives on eBay and end up with the entire history of some guy's girlfriend's medical problems in old e-mails, a small collection of old cached Slashdot pages, and some rather naff Flash animations..."

So your the one that ended up with my old hard drive ...

Re:Similar to MIT students in Jan 2003

[System.out.println()]

No, you're most likely to wind up with large porn collections.

Re:Similar to MIT students in Jan 2003

[buck_wild]

"...and some rather naff Flash animations."

WTF is naff? "Unstylish, clichéd, or outmoded."

You wacky Britts...

What kind of bullshit story is that?

[Anonymous Coward]

At least post some backup or I've gotta call bs on that one.

Re:What kind of bullshit story is that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yea, well I found a 1gb microdisk under by burger patty at McDonald's. Guess what, it belonged to GW Bush and it had nuclear launch codes on it.

Re:What kind of bullshit story is that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! I know you're lying!

GW only has nukular launch codes.

Ba doomp boomp! Thanks, I'll be here all week. Be sure to tip your waitress.

old computer

[keadie]

I bought a old computer once that had a database of about 200 names, address, phone numbers, DOBs and SSNs. They didn't delete anything on the hard drive. It had NT on it, I just used linux to check what was on it for grits and shingles. That company is lucky that I'm not evil...any opening bids?

Re:old computer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll give you $5.

I'm going to rip a line from Schnier(sp?)

[foidulus]

and say that if your company's secrets are that valuable, the safest way to get rid of hard drives is just to scrap them. Laptops are a slightly different story, but how much can one actually expect to get off an auction of an old hard drive off of ebay? By the time you figure in all the auction fees, labor to ship them etc, I would bet that the companies probably don't make that much. It might just be safer to eat the cost than to try to sell them. It all really depends on the value of your secrets.

Re:I'm going to rip a line from Schnier(sp?)

[russianspy]

Here is an idea.

Wipe the drive and sell it (at next to nothing) to your employees. Depending on your company and the number of geeks in it - there will always be someone who wants a 4-5 year old laptop for a project. Besides, no shipping charges. In the worst case, your employees get access to the data (most of them have it anyways). You do trust your employees, right?

Re:I'm going to rip a line from Schnier(sp?)

[foidulus]

You do trust your employees, right?
It would be hilarious to find out that your PHB is into goatse!

Re:I'm going to rip a line from Schnier(sp?)

[julesh]

It's probably not the company the data belongs to that's selling it. Most large companies get rid of old PCs by calling in a PC recycling company. These people will say "yes, of course we get rid of your data securely", then do a quick format (essentially just putting a new filesystem over the top of the old one and not wiping the data areas) and sell it on.

Why do they sell it rather than disposing of it through ordinary channels? Because they're not legally allowed to dispose of it in any way that would end up in a landfill site. Which is almost every way that they could dispose of it, other than selling it. They could, I guess, separate out the case from the platters, melt everything down and sell it as scrap metal, but (a) it would be worth even less and (b) would be more difficult to arrange.

The problem is that recycling laws make it almost impossible for these people to do anything else.

Re:I'm going to rip a line from Schnier(sp?)

[Idarubicin]

the safest way to get rid of hard drives is just to scrap them.

The most secure deletion technique I'm familiar with involves all the usual steps of overwriting the drive several times...

...then you take the drive down to the loading docks and have one of the guys run over it with a forklift.

Re:I'm going to rip a line from Schnier(sp?)

[Pionar]

I work for a department in a medical school that deals with a lot of patient data. Due to HIPAA (medical privacy law that went into effect last year) and just plain old common sense, we had to come up with a standard plan of salvage of old machines. We now have a "drive wiping" kit that consists of a hammer and a drill.

DUPE!

[LostCluster]

Stop, timothy... we've heard this joke before. In fact, you seem to post this same story every nine months or so.

Circa September 2003... nine months ago.
Circa January 2003... eighteen months ago.

Then again, we've been talking about this problem for a year and a half, yet there still are people stupid enough to be selling HDs with readable data that should be kept secret on them without doing DOD-level formatting.

Re:DUPE!

[DrEldarion]

yet there still are people stupid enough to be selling HDs with readable data that should be kept secret on them without doing DOD-level formatting.

And you can be sure as hell that there are people smart enough to be buying used HDs specifically because they know that they'll hit the jackpot with one of them.

The thing that sucks is that we as consumers really have no way of knowing how much of our information is being given away like this since companies don't usually have anything posted about what they do with old hardware.

Re:DUPE!

[pseudochaotic]

1. Go to old stories
2. Find where people just reposted old comments
3. Put some sort of reply about how they reposted an old comment
4. Informative Karma!

Re:DUPE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Some things are worth repeating?

Just so long as he doesn't repost it tomorrow :P

Re:DUPE!

[noidentity]

Stop, timothy... we've heard this joke before. In fact, you seem to post this same story every nine months or so.

So... Slashdot is like those hard drives, with old data still hanging around to come across if you're bored.

Re:DUPE!

[dj245]

In fact, you seem to post this same story every nine months or so.

Well everyone knows that the average memory of the /.er is 9 months.

Re:DUPE!

[grainofsand]

I have worked with journalists who do exactly that. Each morning you search back through the archives and have a look at the stories from the same day 3, 6, 9 and 12 months previously. Then do the same but for 2, 5 and 10 years back.

ctrl-C, ctrl-V, change date, add update / new quote and you have a "new" story. Keeps editors happy.

Re:DUPE!

[Cally]

Then again, we've been talking about this problem for a year and a half, yet there still are people stupid enough to be selling HDs with readable data that should be kept secret on them without doing DOD-level formatting.

It's amazing, isn't it, there are still IT directors out there who don't get their policy and procedure ideas from a close reading of Slashdot. I'm only half-joking, actuially, if a few more CIOs / CTOs were /. addicts the world would be a much better place...

Just Destroy The fucking Things!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just Destroy The fucking Things! Are companies really so desperate for money that they need the revenue from used hard drives? It seems to me that the cost of making sure the thing is really clean is more than the thing is worth, so why not just pay someone to destroy them?

Re:Just Destroy The fucking Things!

[neuro.slug]

Why destroy something that is perfectly reusable? We waste enough resources as it is. If anything, give them away to low-budget institutions in need. I'm sure the cost of low-level formatting a bunch of drives really isn't all that high.

Waste = bad.

-- n

Re:Just Destroy The fucking Things!

[weeboo0104]

Are companies really so desperate for money that they need the revenue from used hard drives?

You mean the same type of company that would lay off an employee and hire the employee back as a contractor at 1.5x's the employees original salary to avoid paying health insurance premiums and so they don't have to pay as much to the employees pension???

*choke* Bwahahahahahahaha

Re:Just Destroy The fucking Things!

[l810c]

I worked as a consultant at one of the US's largest banks several years ago. They replaced every desktop computer in the entire company(Thousands and Thousands) with new Compaqs for Y2K.

Everyone was asking about buying the old computers as many of them would have been pretty descent machines.

When mine was finally replaced I pressed the guy in charge about what was happening to all of them. He told me that for 'security reasons' they were going to destroy all of them.

Re:Just Destroy The fucking Things!

[Anonymous Coward]

the whole computers or just the hdds? god that's wasteful if it's all of it.

Re:Just Destroy The fucking Things!

[Captain DaFt]

The Major companies just lease hard and lap tops.
The providing company usually sells the old computers in bulk to aftermarkets after they're returned, or strips them for reusable parts and sell or junk the rest of the parts.
(usedcomputer.com, refurbdepot.com and techsoup.com are a couple of companies that quickly come to mind)

Re:Just Destroy The fucking Things!

[Anonymous Coward]

He told me that for 'security reasons' they were going to destroy all of them.

And by "destroy" he meant "give them to some guy who will disassemble them and sell the parts on ebay"

Re:Just Destroy The fucking Things!

[Anonymous Coward]

Are companies really so desperate for money that X?

Yes (for almost any value of X).

Re:Just Destroy The fucking Things!

[Inominate]

It seems that a lot of these drives that end up on ebay aren't from the companies that owned them. They pay a company to dispose of the drives, and that company turns around and sells them on ebay.

Re:Just Destroy The fucking Things!

[Halvard]

Or like Electric Boat: lay out a couple thousand shipyard workers in '91 and give a bonus to the CEO equal to their salary. When they're in the red? I can't point you too a link but I was on a new con boat at the time and witnessed it.

In other news...

[Nicholas Evans]

In other news, SCO recently purchased a used PC from eBay containing its IP and e-mails sent by Linus Torvalds proving that he stole SCO's IP for the linux kernel, and that he didn't actually write the linux kernel.

What? Troll, am I? Well, it's slashdot. Someone had to poke fun at SCO. Sue me.

Re:In other news...

[Zeebs]

Using SCO and sue me in the same post... You are far braver then I.

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a Troll. A Karma-Starved Idiot.

well this changes things...

[bigben7187]

I guess i am going to keep my hard drives when i get a new computer, I dont want anyone to find out about all of that stuff that i "didn't" do...

hard DIVES?

[spir0]

timothy... you just took one buddy.

Re:hard DIVES?

[BashDot]

Guess the "oops" department is right on track today...

I know I'm OK!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stories like this really scare me, but I know I'm ok - I format my hard drive with my licenced Microsoft Windows XP CD, so I know there's no sensitive data left to be found! That's one of the many benefits of running secure and professionally developed software like windows.

Re:I know I'm OK!

[bigben7187]

actually, windows' formatting does NOT delete the data, it just checks the disk and makes the disk nice and clean, but most of the space is not altered, so your old "hobbies" might still be evident, even after formatting.

Re:I know I'm OK!

[Anonymous Coward]

You hear that LOAD ROAR?

The deafening SONIC BOOM?

Feel the HURRICANE FORCE WINDS?

That's the Joke flying right over your head.

Re:I know I'm OK!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahahahahahahahaha!

You are joking, right?

Is it worth the money

[Anonymous Coward]

to sell old hard drives on eBay? I would think the cost of handling the entire transaction would cost more than the selling price of some old drive.

My organization disassembles the drives and incinerates the platters. I'd like to see anyone get data from them.

Re:Is it worth the money

[baywulf]

I once made more than the usual amount of money on a harddrive on ebay but the buyer was very specific about the model number he wanted. Apparently he had a drive with a bad pcb that he wanted to swap out to recover data. I didn't exactly recover anywhere near the purchase cost but it was nice change for such a small capacity drive.

Re:Is it worth the money

[BlueCup]

It's really not worth the money when selling one, but if you're a large company selling a couple hundred or more, it could certainly make up the difference.

Re:Is it worth the money

[l810c]

I used to buy surplus SCSI drives a couple of years ago during the dot.bomb heyday, but with the price of drives these days, there's no way I'd want a second hand IDE drive from eBay.

Deconstructing a HD...

[Anonymous Coward]

- Get a Torx screwdriver set from your local hardware store.

- Open the hd. Save the cool looking screws.

- Turn the platters into coasters.

- Just make sure you don't hurt yourself when playing with the magnets.

Re:Deconstructing a HD...

[sik0fewl]

Just make sure you don't hurt yourself when playing with the magnets.

Ha, yeah right. I'd like to see someone who's played with hard drive magnets and not *at least* pinched themselves really good.

Re:Deconstructing a HD...

[Lord Kano]

Never again.

I used to take apart every dead HD that came into the shop just to make wind chimes out of the platters and play with the cool magnets. But I noticed that EVERY TIME I disassembled a drive I got a really bad eyeball head ache. I have not taken a drive apart in about 4 years.

LK

Re:Deconstructing a HD...

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your point? Hard drives contain something that hurts your eyes? I doubt magnets can even affect you in such a way. Not to be an ass, but I just don't get it.

Re:Deconstructing a HD...

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a harddrive apart, remove the magnets, and see, actually feel for yourself.

Re:Deconstructing a HD...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm doing this as soon as I get home this evening!

Why SlashDot keeps posting dupes!

[kidMike]

Maybe someone bought the old hard drives from a /. server, grabbed the admin passwords for the site, and keeps posting the old articles they recover! It makes perfect sense. Surely the admins can't keep making these mistakes over and over... err, nebbermind. kM

Research dupe?

[Amgine007]

I thought I read this before... Though the story is new, it looks this is a private company essentially duplicating (copying?) the earlier work of the MIT guys to reach... gasp... the same conclusion.

May or may not help...

[ejaw5]

Perhaps advice for anyone planning to let go of a hard drive:

Use the shred utility, with a good number of iterations (25 sounds good). Go to the root directory and issue
shred -n 25 -u -v *

Then when you're done with that, low level format the drive using a disk utility such as the ones that come with Maxtors and Western Digital drives.

Re:May or may not help...

[aardvarkjoe]

You would probably be better off running shred on the device file: "shred -v /dev/hdb", or whatever. Your method has trouble on journaled filesystems, and will leave information like filenames and directory structure around.

Re:May or may not help...

[mebon]

One caveat...

If you are going to use a file shredder make sure you aren't using a journalling filesystem. From the shred manpage:

CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that the filesystem overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way to do things, but many modern filesystem designs do not satisfy this assumption. The following are examples of filesystems on which shred is not effective:

* log-structured or journaled filesystems, such as those supplied with AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)

* filesystems that write redundant data and carry on even if some writes fail, such as RAID-based filesystems

* filesystems that make snapshots, such as Network Appliance's NFS server

* filesystems that cache in temporary locations, such as NFS version 3 clients

* compressed filesystems

Re:May or may not help...

[hool5400]

Do all that, and then smash it with a hammer into bit size pieces. And then throw those pieces to the bottom of various oceans.

Then you are safe...maybe.

Re:May or may not help...

[xsbellx]

I don't mean to sound like a prick, but could you please explain this to me? You are writing over the entire PHYSICAL disk, not a single partition or file. If the journal is located on a different physical device, you could shred/dd the partition/file that contained the journal.

Re:May or may not help...

[xsbellx]

I know it's not good form to reply to your own posts, but I must appologize. I reread the post and the parent is quite correct. Mea culpa.

Before you shoot you mouth off, make sure your brains are loaded!

Re:May or may not help...

[Sigma 7]

Then when you're done with that, low level format the drive using a disk utility such as the ones that come with Maxtors and Western Digital drives.

Some hard drives do not permit a low-level format - it's hard coded in the electronics to prevent that sort of stuff. When released from the factory, the harddrives are allegedly formatted in their optimal setting - redoing this can cause loss of capacity.

There are rumours that some users have managed to do a low-level format anyway, resulting in the 80GB harddrive now only capable of holding around 1mb. (Units are correct, although the second value is somewhat exaggerated since I don't remember the actual result.)

Not unlike the findings of another article

[cryptor3]

The findings seem similar to this slashdot article referencing this article about the findings of Garfinkel and Shelat.

Can I get my hard drive...

[raistphrk]

from Scott Richter? I want to find out which credit card he uses to buy the pills to make his girlfriend THANK HIM TON1GHT!@!

Seriously though. If I could get a dirty hard drive, getting a spammer's drive would be a fun project...as long as I could figure out his favorite personal email address.

Re:Can I get my hard drive...

[Exiler]

Spammers don't use e-mail for personal matters. Too much junk mail.

Hard drive erasing HOWTO

[infolib]

What they should have used: Secure Harddisk Eraser

The Secure harddisk eraser is a Linux boot floppy that overwrites your drive with random bits. Comes in a 3-pass and a 35-pass version. Insert, boot, wait for beep. Free as in GPL.

Re:Hard drive erasing HOWTO

[foo fighter]

Secure Harddisk Eraser is worthless unless you have a single IDE drive attached directly to your motherboard via ATA.

If you have more than one IDE drive attached to the motherboard it won't work correctly.

If you have SATA drives it doesn't work.

If you have SCSI it doesn't work.

If you have an IDE expansion card on your PCI bus, RAID or plain jane, it doesn't work.

It's a pretty shite program, even for being free.

Who resells HDs anyhow?

[astro]

I mean, I just keep cycling slow / error-prone ones to slower and more corner-case servers until they quite literally become doorstops. I have never considered even the slightest bit of resale value out of HDs.

Re:Who resells HDs anyhow?

[john_anderson_ii]

I guess that depends on the context. I mean, if you are a large company reselling entire PCs that were scrapped due to a recent departmental upgrade, then you might recover some value. Those PCs that were sold still contain information on their HDDs. Here in AZ, there are many auctions every weekend where one can purchase used PCs that were scrapped by some company by the pallet load. I'm sure if one wanted to spend the time, then one coudl obtain a wealth of information from the drives contained therein.

Eraser (GPL)

[KrisHolland]

That is only gratis software, so you really don't know how well it works, if at all.

A better choice is Eraser, it is GPLed.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/

You can also make a nuke boot disk with this program that automatically starts erasing everything upon start up. Don't forget to clearly label it ;).

Re:Eraser (GPL)

[Anonymous Coward]

None of that crap is worth a damn. An NMR scan can still be used to recover some data after as many as one hundred overwrites.

Here's a handy tip. DON'T SELL DRIVES THAT CONTAINED SENSITIVE DATA! Asshole companies and schmucks like you need to learn this lesson.

You want to make sure that no one can recover old data from a drive? Physically destroy the platters and then scatter the pieces. Anything less is a waste of time.

Re:Eraser (GPL)

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and before some one smarty-pants comes by and says "Oh, no criminal is going to bother with that."...

You are correct. No *single* criminal is going to build or steal an NMR rig just to scan drives. But a criminal gang will because the rig is an investment that will pay for itself in thousands of bits of private information.

Re:Eraser (GPL)

[Exiler]

Label it? You mean, something like "Windows Installation" or "Intrarnet Access" and leave it laying around school?

Re:Eraser (GPL)

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for putting time into making that GPL link. It really helps a lot.

Re:Eraser (GPL)

[Tumbleweed]

Nah, label it 'porn,' or 'secret files,' or somesuch.

Re:Eraser (GPL)

[DerekLyons]

That is only gratis software, so you really don't know how well it works, if at all.

A better choice is Eraser, it is GPLed.

Being GPL isn't much of a help here either. Whether you can truly erase a drive depends on so many low level (read: inside the drive 'black box') factors, that it's impossible to be 100% certain the disk is clean.

Physical destruction of the disk is the best and only certain way of ensuring that critical data isn't still readable. Degaussing takes second place.

Re:Eraser (GPL)

[Anonymous Coward]

> That is only gratis software, so you really don't know how well it works, if at all. A better choice is Eraser, it is GPL [gnu.org]ed.

What The HELL does a program's license have to do with its quality? Geez, talk about GPL zealotry!

Re:Eraser (GPL)

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

What The HELL does a program's license have to do with its quality? Geez, talk about GPL zealotry!

Its not about the licesne you dolt, its about source code visibility. If you can't see the source code, then you can't easily sure what the program is really doing.

Re:Eraser (GPL)

[bit01]

More like commercial zealotry. Yes, most vendors would like to pretend the license doesn't matter and bury all the nasty stuff in the fine print.

We here in the real world know that the license is one of the most important characteristics of a program. It can have a major effect on the quality or otherwise of the user experience, including the quality of the program itself.

When the vendor hides the source, disclaims all liability in the license and provides no realistic mechanism for fixes then for any significant piece of software odds are you're going to have unfixable problems.

---

It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.

Re:Eraser (GPL)

[Technonotice_Dom]

It is - at least you can check the code to see if it's designed to do the job and not just show a pretty progress bar...

Agreed though on the rest of your message!

Re:Eraser (GPL)

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? I guess I should throw away my hand-rolled disassemblers I have been using for the last 20 years to debug and inspect sourceless software!

Source is overrated. You can't read half of people's coding styles anyway.

Re:Eraser (GPL)

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

Really? I guess I should throw away my hand-rolled disassemblers I have been using for the last 20 years to debug and inspect sourceless software!

Lets try this again with some emphasis for those lacking in reading comprehension skills:

Its not about the licesne you dolt, its about source code visibility. If you can't see the source code, then you can't easily sure what the program is really doing.

Source is overrated. You can't read half of people's coding styles anyway.

Source is overrated? It doesn't make the life of someone trying to read it much easier?

Sure.

shred floppy

[wirzcat]

http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave/

Works like a charm. And it has various levels of paranoia to choose from.

A Large Multinational Bank had this problem

[sabinm]

Happened to me once. My brother in law worked for a Large Multinational Bank and he new that I liked old computer junk. So he gave me a bunch of old 2/3/486 computers that were surplused from his job. They gave them to him because they didn't know how to get rid of them. Here was the catch . . . they didn't even format the things

So I had their FedEx programs, account numbers, their in-house banking programs and a sweet little windows 3.1 interface. Needless to say I disposed of the information properly. But I told my brother in law. He said "Oh, really" and just forgot about it. Go figure.

It is far too easy for those who would take advantage of sensitive information to exploit it for their own gain. They are quite fortunate someone like me got their hard drives and not someone bent on robbing them blind.

Re:A Large Multinational Bank had this problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Texas A&M University, late 90s... Poor college student digs about a dozen old computers out of the dumpster figuring he could salvage one or two computers worth of parts. EVERY SINGLE ONE booted up with no work (windows 95). They were chock full of email, employee info, student grades/personal information and god only knows what else.

Re:A Large Multinational Bank had this problem

[Captain DaFt]

Heh, The computer I'm currently posting on was rescued from dumpster duty. It had all the companies data from the last quarter it was used on it. I was nice enough to reformat it for them before I upgraded the OS. BTW, my brother worked at the company (He was the one that pointed out the computer to me), He still doesn't know how I found out what his first year's pay was!) };->

Re:A Large Multinational Bank had this problem

[irokitt]

Yep, found a computer in my school parking lot-someone didn't want to pay the nifty $50 fee San Diego residents are required to fork out to recycle old computers. Hey Kyle, if you're reading this, your data is safe with me;)

Re:A Large Multinational Bank had this problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I too worked for a multinational bank, probably another one...

policy on disposal of computer hardware was simple: shred it.
And I don't mean some software program to remove the data, I mean a shredder.
They had a machine similar to the type used by forrestry workers to shred branches and treestumps into wood chips.
Harddrives, motherboards and network cards were fed into this machine, coming out as tiny chips of assorted materials.
These were then sealed in plastic containers and removed to an incinerator for ultimate destruction.

The other components were donated to charity or sold (if they were still worth anything, most of it was used to destruction anyway).

These people obviously weren't

[Anonymous Coward]

using a state of the art solution from JBoss, otherwise they would not have been in this situation in the first place. Only with patented technology from JBoss can you truly get rid of sensitive data on your hard drive. No competition can compare to the advanced solutions offered by JBoss. Nothing even comes close. I do not work for JBoss.

The Real Canadian Method

[dan.hunt]

Real method of the Canadian Armed Forces:

1. remove drive from machine,
2. remove screws from drive,
3. split HD case open,
4. smash to bits.

No data leaks. Really! Kind of brings a tear to the eye of the guy with the screwdriver and hammer though.

Re:The Real Canadian Method

[Anonymous Coward]

The NSA supposedly shoot them with 1 bullet.

Re:The Real Canadian Method

[reverse flow reactor]

A woodchipper can also be a secure method of making data unreadable.

Re:The Real Canadian Method

[Anonymous Coward]

And who has the duty of witnessing this procedure?

A policy is only as secure as the people carrying it out.

Re:The Real Canadian Method

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't the Canadian Armed Forces just put the disk drive on a Sea King helicopter? It will be destroyed within minutes...

Re:The Real Canadian Method

[Halvard]

Most likely after degausing first.

Re:The Real Canadian Method

[leerpm]

And the Canadian Forces would do that too, if we could afford the bullets.

Re:The Real Canadian Method

[stanmann]

yeah, but you ought to see the size of the "bullet"

it's larger than my monitor and the gun is larger than my cube.

Re:The Real Canadian Method

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of brings a tear to the eye of the guy with the screwdriver and hammer though.

Well, he shoulda been wearing safety glasses, then, shouldn't he!

TRIP!

[chocolatetrumpet]

You meant... TRIP!

Alot of people are not aware of this

[MrRuslan]

They think once it is formated evrything is gone but not so...I think HD manufacturers should put warning labels on there hds, They already provide Free utils to write zeros to the hd for that purpose.

Isn't this old news?

[prozac79]

Didn't some M.I.T. students do this for a their Phd thesis already? In my opinion, the only secure way to erase your data before reselling a computer is with a hammer, baseball bat, or hockey stick. It's fun taking apart of harddrive and seeing just how intricate those devices really are.

Some of us prefer to write out our sigs manually each time we post

Wow, I sure do love seeing the same story

[dwaggie]

With a different name and a different consulting company every 3 or 4 months with the 'we found some great stuff on these drives'. Oi vey.

Re:Wow, I sure do love seeing the same story

[DrMrLordX]

You don't expect anyone to write a story about acquiring used hard drives only to find a). nothing on them or b). loads of non-incriminating data on them, do you?

secret data transfers?

[andrewagill]

A while back, I picked up a used X-box which had a CD ripped to the hard drive. They didn't even bother to format it.

So I was thinking--if I needed a secure channel to transfer data, I might sell an X-box and then tell the intended recipient to buy an X-box from that shop.

I am secure

[mboverload]

I wipe all my spare disk space with 35 wipes of random data every weekend. I also go through a proxy and have anti-virus, Spybot S&D, spyware prevention tools, and use Mozilla. I also have ZoneAlarm set to high with all programs locked down, the Windows XP firewall, and my router's firewall. All unneeded services are DISABLED.

I also monitor my TCP connections periodicly with TCPview from SYSinternals.

Of course I could just use Linux, but whats the fun in that?

Please learn how to make links.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please learn how to make links.

<a href="http://www.killdisk.com/eraser.htm">Activ e KillDisk</a>

(without the spaces put there by Slashdot) yields: Active KillDisk

erase the disks

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a security concerned organization... :) And all the hard disks that leave the house go through Expert Eraser (commercial product), seven cycles of writing erasing patterns into them. Failed drives go into big magnetic oven and get crunched into pieces. It's not expensive if you consider the value of your data.

It's not that simple

[beakerMeep]

I think the danger lies when company X's IT department sells their old computers on ebay and doesn't protect your info for your medical insurance, 401k, social security number, CC number etc. I think it's more worrysome at the enterprise level rather than the individual level. It's not very pratical to go through all that effort to recover one CC number from somone's computer or their web logs just to see that the spend all day on the Jelly of the Month Club Web Forums. But if you got yourself Visa'a database...$

keeping your companies hard drives

[isoprophlex]

the company i work for actually goes to the point of making sure they keep the hdd's that are previousely used from old employee's these hard disk drives are never thrown out or sold. it's bad practice. have an it guy, saying "yeah that's ok to sell" is probably the it guy thinking, "oh who cares, the ebay loser buying it doesn't know how to do what i know how to do".

Lord of the scrap

[Fullmetal Edward]

Wasn't the guys who did the CG for lord of the rings selling off their machines or something? I think I read something like that on Slashdot. Would be extremely intresting if true. You could in theory (and some luck) view things which they left out the film (who knows what animations they made but never used for people. I can't think of many places which don't have inside jokes and make easteggs based on them. There could be anything from Gollum dancing to hot Legolas sex).

I might be wrong but if I'm not would be worth trying to get hold of one of said machines and have a little play with the old memory box.

We break them!

[MightyJB]

I work for a large manufacturing company in the US. The facility I'm in has an interesting approach. First they format... Then they drop a 20 pound weight on it. Usually a few times. I'm sure if someone really wanted the data they could get it, but it's raises the bar a little.

Re:We break them!

[agoatley]

20 pounds~10 kilograms 10kg~98 newtons If they drop it from one metre: 98 newton-metres=98 joules~14 volts at 7 amps for 1 second. Yeah, a couple of those should do it :)

Re:We break them!

[Anonymous Coward]

those policies are usually made by people that have no idea how hard drives work.

if they would simply run one of the freely available shredder or eraser programs they could get money out of the drives...

or at least happier employees.

Re:We break them!

[calethix]

if they would simply run one of the freely available shredder or eraser programs they could get money out of the drives...
or at least happier employees.

I don't know, dropping 20lb weights on hard drives would make a lot of employees happier too.
What I never understood is if you're going to smash/burn the drive, does it really need to be formatted first?

PowerPoint presentations?

[pyrrhonist]

15 Microsoft PowerPoint presentations containing highly sensitive company information.

Well, that's BS. Nothing even remotely important gets put into a PowerPoint presentation.

I know, I've been to meetings. God, have I been to meetings...

Re:PowerPoint presentations?

[cerberusss]

When my gf did her report for graduation on the market approach of a large bank in our friendly European country, she googled and found a presentation on the national Microsoft website. It was about how they categorized their partners into levels and how to treat them, i.e. which advantages they get.

Of course, it was noted that the small partners get almost nothing, so this was slightly sensitive material. A few days later it couldn't be found anymore on that URL.

Re:PowerPoint presentations?

[kabocox]

15 Microsoft PowerPoint presentations containing highly sensitive company information.

Well, that's BS. Nothing even remotely important gets put into a PowerPoint presentation.

Maybe they are on to a new format for storing sensitive company information. Make the retrival and presentation of the data so boring everyone that would really want the data would sleep through the presentation.

Temp & Swap Files Are A Problem For Encrypted

[Goo.cc]

I think that for the really sensitive data, having any unencrypted data written to the hard drive can be a problem. Aftera all, what is the point of encrypting a file it gets written disk as part of the swap file, or even as a temp file in /tmp?

If I really wanted a secure system, I would have a Unix system with hard disk partitions mounted read-only and a RAM disk for writable use.

They did this again?

[slashname3]

I remember this being done several years ago. Did they repeat the same project?

Buyers in danger?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, so people selling drives should delete the data. No news there.

What about people -buying- the drives? What happens if for some reason a government agency is searching your stuff, and finds the echos of child porn/other illegal data on the drive? How do you prove it's not yours?

Re:Buyers in danger?

[kju]

who modded this troll? the question is interesting.

not just ebay

[MikeFM]

I have seen customers [of mine] buy a refurbished drive that came direct from a major harddrive maker that had not even been formatted let alone really cleaned. This knowledge would make me wary of taking a busted drive in for an exchange if I'd already wrote some of my data to it before it failed.

Darik's Boot and Nuke (GPL)

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Darik's Boot and Nuke, also a Sourceforge project that is GPL. Bootable Linux floppy, has purged any drive I have thrown at it - windows, Unix, and BeOS partitions.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Re:Darik's Boot and Nuke (GPL)

[aligas]

Eraser actually uses Darik's Boot and Nuke when you use it to wipe an entire drive. See the features page.

Little bits of metal == the only way to go

[Gunfighter]

I was lucky enough to never have to worry about this sort of problem when I worked for Uncle Sam. We had to take the actual platters out of our discarded hard disks and grind them down with a belt sander. No recyling either. Once we had a pile of dust, we had to dump the remains in a drum of some sort of acidic crap (usually used to destroy reams of sensitive print material). I always found it funny to see a few nice, shiny disks in the bottom of the safe with a classification label on them awaiting their demise.

Perhaps there's money to be made in performing this sort of destructive service for banks and other entities handling sensitive customer information.

Re:Little bits of metal == the only way to go

[real_smiff]

phew, good thing you dissolved that platter dust! otherwise, obviously, we'd have terrorists glueing the bits* back together and getting the data back. i mean, if you'd stopped after grinding them down with the belt sander, i dread to think where we'd be..

*excuse the pun, but it's kind of fitting. but please note the sarcasm.

Re:Little bits of metal == the only way to go

[noidentity]

Perhaps there's money to be made in performing this sort of destructive service for banks and other entities handling sensitive customer information.

Maybe, but there's definitely money to be made in performing apparent destructive services on sensitive data...

Re:Little bits of metal == the only way to go

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you suggesting that you ever can be sure ENOUGH? Better overkill than underkill

Re:Little bits of metal == the only way to go

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of curiousity - what's to stop you from bringing your own hard disk to work in your pocket, and switching it with the one to be destroyed when you disassemble the machine?

There's nothing more dangerous than the illusion of absolute security...

Re:Little bits of metal == the only way to go

[ajs318]

My thoughts entirely ..... you can launch the damn thing into the sun if you like, but if you can't be certain that the drive you were trying to destroy is the same one that has the information on it, then it's all just a show.

Re:Little bits of metal == the only way to go

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you describe the classification label? I've got a harddrive with a Top Secret label; it looks legit.

Re:Little bits of metal == the only way to go

[Gunfighter]

what's to stop you from bringing your own hard disk to work in your pocket, and switching it with the one to be destroyed when you disassemble the machine?

Men in green camoflauge utilities with loaded weapons who go through your bags when you enter and exit. That coupled with the big sign out front that reads "Use of deadly force authorized" are usually enough to convice people to NOT try such antics.

Oh... and a little piece of paper they make you sign. It mentions something about a hefty fine and an all expenses paid vacation at some place in Kansas.

Re:Little bits of metal == the only way to go

[iminplaya]

...i dread to think where we'd be..

Wouldn't want a repeat of this now, would we?

From the link...In fact, the only relevent part:
The transcripts were among the dozens of bags of hastily shredded documents seized by Islamic "students" when they stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979. Bit by bit, the students reassembled the shredded pages and published them in a 40-odd volume series called "Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den."

Sounds fascinating. I couldn't find a copy on Amazon.:-)

Darik's Boot 'n' nuke

[Neo-Rio-101]

Darik's floppy disk sized mini-Linux-onepurpose-distro is what I use to surgically clean hard disks.
Click here

The floppy disk I created is red and I went so far as to draw a skull and crossbones on it, knowing full well what booting this thing does to a PC. A disk like this is an essential little tool to any geek's arsenal.... alongside Knoppix and tomsrtbt.

The only thing is it takes HOURS to DoD wipe a hard disk. It took 15 hours for me to fully DoD a 40GB drive.

Re:Darik's Boot 'n' nuke

[Cecil]

The only thing is it takes HOURS to DoD wipe a hard disk.

From all I've ever heard, the really important part of a DoD wipe doesn't take hours, and more importantly, doesn't come on a floppy disk.

People love to call things by important-sounding terms, but often they're only half-truths. A favourite of mine: "industrial-strength". Are your kitchen knives, perhaps made out of "industrial-grade stainless steel"? Think about how much steel is required for most industrial processes -- does it seem more likely that the big factory will splurge an extra $50/ton for top-grade steel to make their lawnmower blades, or will they see switching to bargain-basement steel as a few million dollars they can easily cut out of their budget?

Ahh, marketing-speak, how we love ye.

Re:Darik's Boot 'n' nuke

[OneFix]

The DoD (If by DoD you mean "Department of Defense") doesn't even bother to format the drives...they simply shred them...don't know about the highest levels, but they probably melt those down too...

Re:Darik's Boot 'n' nuke

[Anonymous Coward]

DBAN is nice, but it's hard to know if wipe actually succeeded or not. When you erase good disk it often exits at the end with 'completed with non-fatal errors'. However when you attempt to erase disk that has single bad sector somewhere it goes until that bad sector and exits with 'completed with non-fatal errors'. Err.. Great! It erased only beginning of disk with bad sector and everything from that bad sector is still there waiting for curios next owner. Major problem I'd say. It should present big screen with caution message that disk has NOT been erased. 'non-fatal' my ass!

Re:Darik's Boot 'n' nuke

[Junior J. Junior III]

I always thought it was funny to see the phrase "industrial-strength steel" -- as though there was steel on the market that *wasn't* produced by heavy industry... "Oh yeah, sure, I have a little smelter in my basement, but I only use that for light applications, you wanna do this job right you gotta use industrial strength steel!"

Re:Darik's Boot 'n' nuke

[Cecil]

Well, to be fair, there are some special applications which require ultraexpensive, ultrapure metals, alloys like steel included -- chemistry and laboratories come to mind.

But to suggest that anyone would use these sort of things to build the sort of product you'd see on an infomercial proclaiming that it uses super-strong steel is ludicrous. Obviously they're getting the cheapest materials available. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to sell it to you for that LOW LOW PRICE!

shred /dev/hdX

[sik0fewl]

Not sure if this actually works (don't want to try it out now :), but can't one do shred /dev/hdX to "wipe" a hard drive? I'm sure this would make it quite safe to give away, although I still wouldn't recommend corporations doing so.

Re:shred /dev/hdX

[reverius]

no, shred overwrites the contents of a file and then removes that file (unlinks).

because /dev/hdX is just a file like any other (though it is a block device), the remove wouldn't work. you certainly could "overwrite" /dev/hdX first with whatever you wanted to fill the drive (which I'm sure shred would do)...

but when it came time to delete the file, you'd be "deleting" your hard drive... which simply isn't possible. at best you'll have deleted the (temporary) block device node. you'll delete the file /dev/hdX, but the hard drive that it points to is obviously still there...

with only one layer of data overwritten on it. so in short, no.

Re:shred /dev/hdX

[sik0fewl]

Actually, shred doesn't remove the file after it's done shredding, unless you ask it to (-u). Also, shred writes twenty five "layers" of data and you can even increase this amount if you want (-n).

Re:shred /dev/hdX

[reverius]

i see. i suppose i was misinformed. thanks! i guess that's what i'll be using next time, after reading what i have (just now) about various (non-working) floppy-based methods. knoppix + shred = no more data on your hard drive :)

Re:shred /dev/hdX

[bcmm]

Slightly OT, but shred is great for floppies that have junk on them that confuses stupid formatting software.

shred -n 0 -z /dev/fd0

and every bit on the disk is set to 0. (The -n 0 means no random passes, the -z makes one 0 pass, to hide the erased data normally.) It's quicker than whatever the equivalent dd line is.

why not use DBAN?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better - use Darik's Boot and Nuke, also a Sourceforge project that is GPL. Bootable Linux floppy, has purged any drive I have thrown at it - windows, Unix, and BeOS partitions. You also get to select how many passess you want, instead of being stuck at a 3 or 35 pass version.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

How about this ....

[argoff]

a) boot 2 linux cd
b) dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda (sda, whatever)
c) do it a few times if it makes you feel better, but the first pass is likely more than enough

Re:How about this ....

[ticktockticktock]

or if you are bored, use:
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda
and just wiggle your mouse a little for entropy.

In a police environement

[Chip7]

I work in a police force environement. They have a strict policy on hard drives: No hard drives ever leaves the HQ, unless it is sealed it it's original bag or to be used by a employee. If a PC or laptop has to be shipped to be repaired, we remove the drives. When we give our PCs to charity, they're HDless. Even faulty drives aren't thrown away. They're kept until someone decides to head to the incinerator and throw'em in themselves. Even if they're under warranty (and needs to be returned to be honored) we don't. We buy a new drive and that's it!

It'd figure other industries would do the same. Heck it's your business, your data, your life (well, only of part of it hopefully!) you have on these disk. Why bother with selling them? To get 20$ 50$? The way i see it, selling hard drives is equal to selling random filing cabinet without making sure they're empty.

slightly off-topic side note:
Some officers here are so tight about security: One of out tech went out to replace a fried power supply. When walking out with the roasted one, one guy asked: "Hey couldn't there be data on there?" the tech answered a polite "no" with a smile. The guy handed him a pair of cutter and said:"Well why don't you cut-off those wires just to make sure" !! :-D
/slightly off-topic side note

Re:In a police environement

[Anonymous Coward]

Ignoring the warranty is silly, bigger vendors understand that you don't want to give away valuable platters, and will accept an empty chassis as proof that the damaged drive was destroyed not re-used. On more expensive disks that's got to be worth the extra couple of minutes it takes to remove the platters, plus there's less to destroy later.

Re:In a police environement

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Even if they're under warranty (and needs to be returned to be honored) we don't. We buy a new drive and that's it!

Sometimes it's really nice to work for a large federal agency. We have enough clout with our suppliers that we don't have to return dead hard drives. When we call in a bad hard drive for warrantied replacement, it's in our suppliers contract that they don't get the defective drive back. When they send a replacement drive, we return a short signed statement swearing that we've destroyed the original drive. That's all there is to it. Dell and Compaq, our two most recent suppliers, will happily cut deals like that for people who buy 30,000 computers a year.

And no, before anybody gets suspicious, nobody I've ever heard of has exploited this procedure to steal hard drives. It could be done, of course, but losing a good job, benefits, and your pension sure as hell ain't worth a free hard drive.

Government

[oneshot47]

My dad did computer forensics for 10 years in the air force and i know for a fact that it takes a lot of work to completely format a drive. Even measures that people take to destroy a drive (i.e. drilling a hole thru the platters) arent entirely effective. With the right tools you can recover data from all but the most carefully destroyed or formated drives.

Re:Government

[mdielmann]

The one thing I learned from Conspiracy Theory was that if you want stuff destroyed in short order (say, in response to a knock on the door) is that if you don't see smoke, they can learn something from it. And the link has my .sig in context. That can't be a coincidence...now where's my tinfoil hat?

Re:Government

[DMUTPeregrine]

I've always been partial to concentrated HCL baths. That and a nice grinding wheel makes the data just a tad hard to recover.

Re:Government

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is, as data density goes up in HD platters, is it getting harder to get the information back? I'm thinking if you removed the platters on a modern 80Gb HD and smacked them up with a hammer that you couldn't get 99% of the data back - which wasn't true 10 years ago.

What software did they use??!!

[natas802]

So everyone talked about what programs people should use to get rid of the data, but what i want to know is what program did this firm use to extract all this data off the drives? Id like to test this out on my own and see if i can recover some stuff off a recently formatted laptop!

Re:What software did they use??!!

[Tony-A]

what i want to know is what program did this firm use to extract all this data off the drives?

strings /dev/hda | less

will give you some idea what's on the drive

I'm sure with a bit of effort there are much better means.

Thrift stores have lots of computers...

[antispam_ben]

... usually with running hard drives. I've bought $2 pentiums, one of the latest is 400MHz. A 486 machine I bought solely for its tall case has Autocad R13 and a bunch of drawings on it. It just happens to be configured for a graphics tablet I have (a separate thrift store purchase).

I never "dispose" of old drives, I like taking them apart. They have excellent Neodynm {sp} magnets in them, and other fun parts. Hang the platters outside to make a wind chime - I doubt the data would be recoverable for very long out in the weather.

Something like this usually works

[Trogre]

Put in knoppix CD

for(( i=1; $i20; $((i++)) )); do
# Do something to seed random number generator, probably involving the clock
echo Erasing cycle $i;
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda;
done

Encrypted File Systems!

[callipygian-showsyst]

Windows XP lets you have encrypted file systems. (Sadly, more difficult on OS-X.) I use them exclusively. This will keep all but the most determined person from getting my data if all is lost.

Sometimes, for portability between machines I use PGP file systems (using separate PGP software).

Also, I NEVER throw out hard drives without physically destoying them. And I never sell used PCs with hard drives in them. They all get sledged.

Um...

[Dwonis]

Naked horses != horse porn...

Horses don't normally wear clothes, you know.

Re:Um...

[jpetts]

Naked horses != horse porn...

Horses don't normally wear clothes, you know.

You are so wrong!

Re:Um...

[antdude]

I know a horse that does wear clothes. It lives somewhere in Seattle. Those species are very rare! Here is an example. ;)

We Trash 'Em

[geomon]

At the Pacific Northwest Natinonal Laboratory every machine excessed for schools, non-profits, or for public auction has its hard drive removed and then subjected to a machine similar to this bugger.

Believe me, no data is going to survive the bearing press.

The chinese army...

[Trogre]

... had this problem with military laptops. What to do if they get invaded and need to dump their data before getting captured lest their tactical data fall into enemy hands?

They tried hotkey combinations, which would trigger a script to delete the hard drive, but they were either too complex to remember, or too easy to accidentally hit.

In the end, they painted a big red 'X' on the underside of the laptop right where the hard drive sits, and instructed the operator "point gun here".

Re:The chinese army...

[chainsaw1]

The best answer is to have a dual boot system. The default boot disk is your Disk Wipe, the other the actual OS. As soon as someone uninformed about the computer turns it on, it begins wiping data.

Re:The chinese army...

[ManxStef]

There are several problems with that. Firstly, anyone with a clue would just take the disk out and mount it on another system - problem solved. Secondly, even if they're stupid enough to turn this machine on without taking the drive out first, secure deletion takes AGES (as in hours for a 40GB disk in a fast machine using DoD standards, I've tested this myself using DB&N) so it'd be easy to just pull the plug/battery out and recover what's left; a fully-charged laptop battery would probably run out before it'd finished wiping, anyway!

Even physical damage to disks (such as shooting an HDD with an AK47) isn't guaranteed to get rid of all the data - I'm sure that there are people capable of recovering info off fragments of platters, for instance. (E.G. The larger professional data recovery places have spare drive electronics, casings, heads, etc. of pretty much every drive ever made - everything you need to reassemble an HDD from scratch, so if it was important enough I'm sure they'd be able to do something with partial/damaged platters).

The only way to be sure is complete destruction (as others have already said), be it by furnace, grinding, acid or whatever. Watching it disintegrate in front of your own eyes is the best way to be sure :)

Skeet shooting.

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Take out the platters and load up the shotgun.

Geek hint: Do this in that mythical place called "outide", unless you have a very understanding landlord/mother.

Re:Skeet shooting.

[relyter]

They seriously did this in an old issue of PC Accelerator, Titled the "Hardware Assasin"

Simple.

[blair1q]

Partly for this reason I've never sold a hard drive, and now I think I never will.

Data destruction utilities

[brutus_007]

It's nice and swell that a good number of utilities exist that can create a DoD caliber wipe of the data, however, more and more computers are being sold without floppy drives (since Microsoft did away with requiring a floppy drive for a system to be Windows compatible), specially laptops (if you're selling a laptop HD, it's either new, or attached to the remainder of the laptop parts, rarely used laptop drives alone), what do you do when all you have is an optical drive of some type and the hard drive itself?

Perhaps this is a queue to someone to create/build a bootable CD ISO image that can perform the wipe, as well as perhaps other hardware utilities and diagnostic tools.

RAID 0

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use RAID 0, just sell them to different people and you'll be set...

Besides, odds are that by the time you're selling them, you'll have screwed up your stripe set from playing around so you can't read your stuff anyway.

Easiest Way

[foxalopex]

1. Take your HD apart. 2. Save the cool magnets. 3. Toss platters in the fireplace! If you can still recover data from that I'm impressed! Oh and thoes magnets are dangerous. Becareful with them. :)

Even simpler

[achurch]

shred /dev/hda

Spice with -v and -z options as desired.

Re:Even simpler

[karnal]

Let's kick it up a notch.

*BAM!*

Multiple passes of multiple patterns

[The Monster]

a certain number of passes of 0 and 1 bits

I was called upon to wipe a drive on a machine that was being sold. I did a nested loop dd'ing 00, then aa, 55, ff, 00, aa,...ff for a total of 12 passes, three of each pattern. I believe that at that point, even the folks at Langley would have trouble getting something off it. And they don't care.

Re:Multiple passes of multiple patterns

[Anonymous Coward]

gnu shred
it's part of coreutils and works quite well

check it out.

Re:Multiple passes of multiple patterns

[harrkev]

Actually, it may still be possible, believe it or not.

When each track is written, it may not exactly lie on top of the old track. There may be a little bit of the old data left on the "edge" of the current track.

Of course, to get this, you have to put the platter on the equivalent of a magentic scanning-tunneling microscope. In theory, possible. In practice, good luck.

The only sure way...

[OneFix]

The US Gov't takes the whole drive (screws and all) and tosses it into a shredder. They have special shredders that will cut the whole drive to bits (no pun intended)...

The police can recover a drive after it has had zeros written to the drive up to 7 times, and the higher levels of the gov't probably can recover data after it's even further gone. Not only that, but they can recover CeeDees ... even those that have been shattered (just need enough of the pieces...

Re:The only sure way...

[ajs318]

The police can recover a drive after it has had zeros written to the drive up to 7 times, and the higher levels of the gov't probably can recover data after it's even further gone. Not only that, but they can recover CeeDees ... even those that have been shattered (just need enough of the pieces...

Proof? Looks too much like a breach of the laws of physics to me.

Re:The only sure way...

[OneFix at Work]

What do you mean??? You mean recovering a CD? I didn't say that they can recover the whole thing...in most cases, it's enough to just recover a few files (are you willing to bet they can't recover the file with your bank accounts???). If you think about how much data is on even a standard CD, you could recover quite a bit of data from even a single shard. Not to mention that all moden filesystems have error correction built in...you just have to be able to exploit that data.

If you are talking about the hard drive thing, hard drives store bits as magnetic fields. Those magnetic fields tend to keep their properties...they also effect bits close to them...they simply look at the substrate and find the variations in the magnetic field. It also helps that modern OSes tend to have that error correction and there is an increasing amount that do journaling.

Re:The only sure way...

[ajs318]

The data on a CD is written spirally and files are spread out around several complete turns. One shard -- assuming the coating had not peeled off -- would be akin to a narrow strip of paper cut diagonally from a newspaper. Too many gaps in it to make sense of it.

Data on HDs is stored as magnetic fields, that is correct. The read/write head can't -- by design -- tell the difference betwen a "1" that always was a "1" and a "1" that used to be a "0". There are exotic forms of electron microscope that can spot the difference, but they are numbered in the thousands. And they don't show a clear "1" or "0" either ..... you have to interpret the pattern and decide for yourself. One bit at a time. Most of what's on a typical disk platter is crap, and you'd have to wade through a lot of crap to find the good stuff, and that's even if there is anything worth looking for.

Journalling is a bit of a red herring, since the journal file will get overwritten with meaningless stuff sooner or later.

I still maintain that one or two overwrites with really or nearly random data is plenty. Anybody work for a data recovery firm and fancy a challenge?

Secure erase program

[prozaic]

cat /dev/urandom > /dev/hda

If you're not paranoid about your data

[Tony-A]

Take it apart and play with the magnets or something.

If someone will be using the drive, running destructive write badblocks would be a good idea to test the drive's integrity. If you don't particularly care about the drive's integrity, writing zeroes to all of the drive will make it more trouble than it's worth to recover anything from it.

be careful who you hire

[gad_zuki!]

I've seen "consultants" "erase" a disk by just destroying the partition table. And at the time they were making a whole lot more money than me.

Re:be careful who you hire

[Tony-A]

I've seen "consultants" "erase" a disk by just destroying the partition table. And at the time they were making a whole lot more money than me.

Writing to all of the disk even once takes time, lots of time.
Real fast and it won't boot.
(Of course re-partitioning stands a good chance of bringing everything back;)

Re:be careful who you hire

[1u3hr]

(Of course re-partitioning stands a good chance of bringing everything back

A Windows crash screwed up my partition table, eventually I found Testdisk, a marvellous free utility that analysed the disk for an hour then rewrote the tables, and brought it back to life with my data (unbacked) all there.

Re:be careful who you hire

[Obfuscant]

(Of course re-partitioning stands a good chance of bringing everything back;)

Thank God for that.

I have firewire drives on one of my linux systems. These disks contain gigabytes of (legal) mp3s and mpeg videos (Perry Mason, e.g.). They are recorded on a Windows machine and tranferred over the net for long-term storage. One day I thought -- gee, it would be faster to put a firewire card in the windows machine and copy them directly to the disk.

Bzzzzzt. Happy Windows, when it booted, decided to scramble the partition table of said disks for me. Fortunately, I was able to hook them back to linux and fdisk them back to the original state without any loss. And now I know not to connect any firewire linux disks to Windows, at least, not if they contain anything of value. Thanks, Bill.

I consider them lucky

[RAMMS EIN]

If you can sell your hard disk on eBay, you're lucky. Mine usually don't live long enough to be properly retired.

hypothesisesees

[real_smiff]

maybe horse porn lovers like garage sales? or, much more worrying, a much larger % of the pop than we thought. is into horse porn. thanks for the comic goldmine of a post btw.

Another easy alternative -- KNOPPIX

[Atario]

Boot into Knoppix, run shred.

friends hard drive

[cheesy9999]

I had a moronic friend who gave me his FireWire drive that he thought was broken. It turns out it was just the IDE-FireWire bridge that was toast, and the drive worked fine once I put it in my tower. Along with a nice collection of his MP3s I found a nude picture of him. DOH! Never again.

Wipe your disk? Why not encrypt before-hand?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why waste hours of wiping when a much better method is to encrypt the entire disk before ever installing any software on it or using it. Fancy new PCs don't blink when encrypting 100MB/sec, fast enough for any hard disk except RAID devices. I'm sure you can buy nice encryption hardware for RAID devices as well.

"although I [sic] sure industrial espiona..."

[Anonymous Coward]

It helps to read every word, one at a time, with a pause after each word, before hitting the submit button.

A use for all those pictures full of pink bits.

[B.D.Mills]

Or you can do the following:
(1) wipe the drive with ones
(2) wipe the drive with zeroes
(3) fill the drive with p0rn
(4) wipe the drive with ones
(5) wipe the drive with zeroes

When they get to the p0rn layer, the chances are good that they will stop looking further. Once they find all those goodies you planted at step 3, they won't look for all those financial records.

Re:A use for all those pictures full of pink bits.

[stanmann]

This is actually a good suggestion, although I would go with an 8 pass wipe

1 wipe with 1s
2 wipe with 0s
3 wipe with random pattern
4 wipe with 10 pattern
5 wipe with 01 pattern
6 change file system (include at least ext3 reiser ntfs fat)
7 download random stuff from alt.binaries heirarchy
8 repeat depending on original sensitivity.

Re:A use for all those pictures full of pink bits.

[kabocox]

Or you can do the following:

(1) fill the drive with hardcore p0rn
(2) format C:
(3) fill the drive with softcore p0rn
(4) format C:
(5) fill the drive with p0rn thumbnails
(6) format C:

Why bother filling it with ones and zeros? Remember, to properly layer your site defense.

Re:A use for all those pictures full of pink bits.

[Anonymous Coward]

When they get to the p0rn layer, the chances are good that they will stop looking further

Unless they like to look at pr0n.

Re:A use for all those pictures full of pink bits.

[buck_wild]

Nah, just use the goatse.cx guy. The goal should be to give them something really *nasty* to look at so that they stop looking altogether.

Crush, ALT, Destroy!!

[Anonymous Coward]

"The sad consequence is that many potentially useful machines will now be destroyed out of paranoia and cosntribute to computer waste"

There's no need to "destroy" anything. There's a very big name company here that sells the machine, and keeps the hard drives.

--
"Sorry, but according to our tests [Guverment gave'em to us], you are trying to post from an open HTTP proxy [that has naked Cowboy Neal pictures]."

` man shred ` for more info

[Stephen Samuel]

For the purposes of most people who aren't expecting the NSA to go recovering quantum residues off of your disk:

• for N in 1 2 3 4 5 6 ; do
• • echo pass $N .. `date`
  • 
    dd if=/dev/urand of=/dev/hdc
  done

( /dev/hdc presumes that the soon-to-be disposed of drive is the primary drive on the secondary IDE controller. Adjust as appropriate -- eg: /dev/hda to sanitize the dos C: drive).

For those of you who don't have Linux, a copy of Knoppix will do fine, as will using the first install disk of most distributions, and going 'Linux Rescue"
(i've tried this on RedHat.. I'll presume that others have something similar).
Many distributions now also have the 'shred' command which does a (much) more organized version of the same thing.

Oh, and did I mention "Backup any data you want to keep before trying this"?

Can someone explain why 35 times?

[Sark666]

I've never understood why once isn't sufficent. And if once isn't, can 35 guarantee it or is it the more the pass the less like they can retrieve data, but I guess I don't understand to what end.

Re:Can someone explain why 35 times?

[Anonymous Coward]

(numbers made up)
When you have a 1 you really don't have a one, you can have anything from +0.5 to +1.2, 0.5 being the level from which you consider a 1.

So if you have a 0 and overwrite it with a 1, you get 0.8, while if you have a 1 and overwrite with a 1 you get 1.2. By examining the differences you can then easily deduct most of the data that was there before.

If you overwrite it more than once, with random data, it will be a lot more difficult (if not impossible) to retrieve any previous data.

Re:Can someone explain why 35 times?

[cowbutt]

Once is sufficient if all you care about is someone connecting the hard disc up to a machine and attempting to recover confidential information via the standard IDE/SCSI protocol and bus.

But if you're concerned about someone ripping the drive open and using electron microscopy to work out the alignment of the molecules (and from that, the data they store), then theory (and experiments?) shows that the multiple-pattern-wipe technique is sufficient to guarantee data is destroyed.

For most data, therefore, one all-zeros wipe is probably sufficient and will take the least time. But for some users and some data, more wipes will be appropriate.

Peter Gutmann's paper is a good place to start for more detail.

--

Alot of people are not aware of this-IBM DUDstars.

[Anonymous Coward]

"They think once it is formated evrything is gone but not so...I think HD manufacturers should put warning labels on there hds, They already provide Free utils to write zeros to the hd for that purpose."

If they're IBM Deskstars, then they don't need a utility to destroy the data. One comes built in.

---
"Please [button your] proxy or ask your [BOFH] or [MPAA/RIAA run] ISP to do so, [else we're sending our rent-a-goons over to make your Happy Hacker keyboard, very unhappy!]"

Same here

[phorm]

Generally only for admin machines, but there are 2 advantages:

a) Nobody getting our data
b) Nifty rare-earth magnets (3 on my fridge at the moment, and various others given to friends).

Leased PCs

[Detritus]

At one place that I worked, all hard drives were removed and destroyed before the PCs were excessed. That's fine if the organization owns its hardware. What do you do if the computers are leased? Some organizations have switched to leasing all of their desktop PCs.

It's always bothered me that companies that do warranty or repair service never seem to have a public policy on protecting their customer's data.

uhhh

[0utRun]

Did the article mention anything about one of those hard drives having about 20 or so episodes of "Bang Bus" on it?

Because if it did, it wasn't mine.

The only way to be sure...

[Sairret]

My "low-level" formats involve a power drill and a hammer. That platter shall spin nevermore.

mac mashing

[doofusdog]

when disposing of some of the old macs used at the high school where I work, I usually mash the hell outta the drives with a big hammer, especially the connectors and controllers

beating up apple II's with a hammer is great fun too! although that metal coated plastic is very tough

for the counsellors rental laptop that he traded in i used some sort of linux bootdisk that did the DoD overwriting biz, don't remember it's name

ATA/SATA drives can Secure Erase by themselves!

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy who does research on hard drive technology gives away a freeware Secure Erase HDDerase utility that just calls the HARDWARE-BASED Secure Erase capability that is ALREADY BUILT INTO all recent ATA-type hard drives!

We just need to figure out how to get Linux/*BSD/*NIX/Apple/Microsoft to make this an option at the OS or fdisk/format/Disk Utility/Volume Manager utility level so we can all use it easily.

What's all this rubbish about opening up a HD...

[syousef]

...taking out screws, carefully making coasters.....blah blah bleh!

I had a 40GB hard disk that I'd paid a bit more for at the time because it was from a large reliable company (which I won't name) and had decent performance. It had a short life - maybe 2 years before it started playing up. Within 3 or 4 it was unusable even as a backup disk.

I took a great deal of pleasure in "opening it up" with a hammer. The screws were star shaped (torque screws??). The platter actually shatterred into dust and some larger shards. Don't know how safe it was doing this in my backyard, but it was a lot of fun. (Remember the scene from Office Space where they smashed the printer into tiny bits). Good therapy.

Fool proof reformatting

[Bapu]

A torx screwdriver followed by a sledge hammer.

Sparing

[Detritus]

You may not be overwriting all of the data. Many (most?) modern drives will silently replace flakey blocks with spare blocks when they detect problems with a section of the disk. When you overwrite the data, you're overwriting the spare block, not the original block.

A long time ago

[cshark]

Must have been five years ago, a friend of mine aquired some old hard drives from systems that once belonged to adobe. He was able to recover some interesting historical data. One of the drives even had what appeared to be the first PDF file ever generated. He sold copies of the drive's contents on Zip disk. Never did get around to getting one.

If reading these disks is so simple...

[ChozCunningham]

Easy(I hope)support request:
I recently mangled the MBR of the drive that holds 80% of my audio collection. What is the simplest way to restore or at least retrieve the data? I have access to linux (novice-level) or windows. Is there a golden app for this?

I was re-installing win2k over itself, when I painfully learned (midway through) that my 2k cd was fubar. After the aborted re-install, I recieved an error about the boot area. Now, the bios will not usually recognize the drive. Unfortuately, the windows partition was also my a/v files partitition.

Everybody here would probably agree that the data is still on the drive, and should be fetchable. And I didin't overwrite it, either. Thanks, /. hordes!

Re:If reading these disks is so simple...

[Vegeta99]

if it's just the MBR, you can boot from a 2k CD into the System Restore Console and use command fixmbr. Try fixboot for kicks, too.

Re:If reading these disks is so simple...

[ChozCunningham]

tried both. the disk stilll won't boot, nor be recognized by the bios. :(

Re:If reading these disks is so simple...

[Nasarius]

Have you tried just booting into Linux and mounting it? If the partition table is trashed too, you can go into cfdisk and try to recreate it. Or grab a Mandrake installer ISO. The last one I tried (9.something) had a nice partitioner that had a "fix partition table" option.

A little Googling found fixdisktable. Link 1 and 2.

Good luck.

Compaq / MoD UK

[theirishman]

When I worked for Compaq, they had a contract with the MoD in the U.K. and the only way to distroy sensitive data on a drive was to distroy the drive itself. They would drill holes.. and then take the drives out and blow them up... it was pritty cool..as they would hand them back to Compay and say its not working...

Hard drives aren't the only media like this...

[bani]

...I buy used DLT-IV tapes off ebay and found a lot of uhm, "interesting" stuff on some of them.

About 1 out of 10 tapes I buy has stuff like source code for commercial closed source applications, confidential customer data, etc.

It's scary how lax people are with this shit.

Ghost 2003 - GDisk

[Nikkodemus]

Symantec's Ghost 2003 has a command line utility for erasing your HD, allowing the user to select HD, select the amount of passes and various other options, includes a one word switch.

/dodwipe

The final solution...or paranoia

[polemistes]

At least some companies don't take any kind of risks. A friend of mine, who works in a security complany, told me he often get assigned to take a big load of computers, often fairly new ones, to the dump, and there, using a sledge hammer, destroy all components in the computers, including the hard drives.

Hearing about such things makes me angry, since all those computers could have been put to good use. If sensitive information really has to be stored in a computer, then they should take the precautions first, and use good encrypted file systems.

DMCA anyone?

[Andy_R]

Lucky for these guys that they are not in the USA, otherwise they would be breaking the DMCA.

The DoD does it too

[Anonymous Coward]

Some friends of mine bought a Cisco router that still had the original owners' configuration on the flash memory. The original owner was the DoD, and we guessed they probably wouldn't have been keen to see all the information that was stored therein to enter the public domain.

Simson Garfinkel did it one year ago!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing new. This is just replay of old stories. And not very comprehensive research either.

It's a known fact that used hard drives are good source for personal information. See Simson Garfinkel's (more extensive) research from 2003:

http://www.simson.net/clips/2003.CSO.04.Hard_dis k_ risk.htm

Don't sell them, destroy them ...

[JPS]

We do not resell our drives for exactly this reason. We destroy them. And we are actually trying to figure out the most cost-and-simplicity effective way to do so... So far, we tear them apart and keep the platters, but we are not to sure how to destroy the platters simply... Any advice ? :)

Hogwater

[rixstep]

the multiple formatting standards of the DoD

Seems you and others know a lot. Which is probably why they were able to recover so much. Read a bit, OK? A few years back, anyone could be excused for not using their noggins. But you're saying that the most security paranoid nation on the planet is going to publish their techniques - the ones they really use, and these are basically 'wipe with a random number, its complement, then all zeroes'?

Egads. And the Apple people here are worried their users are still too naive...

what we do

[RMH101]

...and we're not military, we're just a large corporation, is we use the simplest solution that definitely works. you can mess around with disk wipers, but if there's the tiniest chance it won't work then it's easier, quicker and cheaper to take it down to engineering and get them to put it under a pillar drill. *no-one's* getting data off a platter that's had a 12mm drillbit go through it.

Re:what we do

[Anonymous Coward]

Just running one drill hole into a disk will not render it totally unreadable, it just means it won't work in a standard PC. You can still retrieve the information off off it if you have the know how. Just depends on how valuable this info is.
For disks sued for defence at level secret and above we used to scrub it, place it on a runway and run over it with a tank!! Then dispose of it in a secure landfill site.

Re:what we do

[RMH101]

...note i said "we're not military". still, it completely Shatters the Platters (StP) which is what counts. good luck to the NSA if they want to get that data back again.
for the more paranoid, simply increase the number of holes.
a power drill's a lot cheaper than a degauser, and *every* techie can find a use for a powerful cordless drill hanging on the wall, even if it's only for threatening lusers.

"DoD-levels of formatting" is themite

[Paul Crowley]

The British Army decommision hard drives using an angle grinder. The US use thermite.

That said, for most purposes programs like Eraser will make data recovery so expensive and ineffective that for the data most of us have, nobody will bother. In fact, that's probably true even of less effective measures such as "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb".

Re:"DoD-levels of formatting" is themite

[BugZRevengE]

most programs are more like dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/dhb and loop that 4 or 5 times...
/dev/zero makes it easier to recover the data then dev random with magnetic detections etc... however you are probably right that it is good enough for most people

Re:"DoD-levels of formatting" is themite

[Paul Crowley]

What you describe is like what "wipe" or (AIUI) Eraser does, only not as good. I chose the /dev/zero example precisely because it isn't as effective as "wipe" or other, more secure methods.

Re:"DoD-levels of formatting" is themite

[BugZRevengE]

why use a less secure method?

Recover data?

[zeth]

I've read some posts here which states that if you overwrite data on a drive, it's possible to recover it. Well, it's NOT. Not according to Ibas, a large data recovery company here in Europe anyway.

The problem with all these so called reasers and such is that they often try to write a continous stream of zeroes for example. The hardware in that case will compress the information, leaving only a small footprint on the storage media itself. That makes it very hard to securily erase a harddrive.

Some people claim that one can read out already overwritten bits from magnetic media. Well, no, you can't. Sure, maybe one can read back a bit or two if you analyze the physical structure of the disk itself. But getting some real data back from overwritten bits is quite impossible, with todays technology.

If you want to securily erase a drive, use a big magnet. I mean big as in the ones used for lifting cars on the junkyard! There are some special tools out in the market for that purpose.
One other way is probably just to remove the platters and crush them into dust.

Even the East German STASI ...

[Savage-Rabbit]

... fell on its face on this count. After the German reunification the Bundesnachrichtendienst, (German Intelligence sercvice, BND for short) combed East Germany for hard drives because the STASI used to pass used ones on to state businesses and institutions. Apparently they were able to recover a fair amount of documentation this way. But the real score was that they found a set of tapes (the famous SIRA tapes) with backups of among other things an index linking agents to the STASI's library of coded agent activity reports which somebody had forgotten to flag for deletion. The problem was of course that the CIA had stolen the directory containing the codename key ie. directory of codename=agents-real-name (aka. "Rosenholz" files) before the BND got to it. So now the CIA knew who all the agents were but no more and the Germans knew how to find out what they were upto. Of course the CIA insisted that the BND hand over the database but refused to trade it for the codename key. Last I knew that request was flatly denied they have now settled on some sort of tit for tat exchange.

So the lesson is, after you whipe your disk, DON'T FORGET THE BACKUP MEDIA!

Re:Even the East German STASI ...

[Denial93]

The German "Behörde für die Unterlagen der Staatsicherheit" did get the Rosenholz Files eventually - although some think in abridged form. I don't know whether they handed over their files to the CIA, but it wouldn't surprise me.

After all, those files aren't really secret. Every German citizen who bothers to make an application is entitled to seeing any files concerning him, and every journalist and historician (or person with a minimum of wit that can pretend to be one) can access a lot of those files.

Re:Even the East German STASI ...

[Savage-Rabbit]

The US did not hand over all of the Rosenholz files which is really irrelevant if what I have heard is true, that the SIRA tapes have now yelded a more complete index than the Rosenholz files. Even so I really doubt The BND/CIA/MI5 will make all of this stuff completely public. Some of it can still be useful, as in witholding information to ensure peoples cooperation=blackmail. Lives can still be ruined with this information.

Re: shred

[hankwang]

Use the shred utility...

Shred is only for the real paranoid. Recovering overwritten data from a magnetic medium is theoretically possible, but there is no evidence that anyone actually succeeded in doing that in a practical situation. It would require a scanning-tunneling microscope (about $100,000) and the bitrate would (my guess) be in the kbit/s range, so recovering a 40 GB harddisk would take about 1 year, assuming 10 kbit/sec. With this,

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=1048576

or

cat /dev/zero > /dev/hdb

you will just write zeros and it will be 25 times faster than using shred.

interesting question

[ajs318]

It takes just two overwrites with really random data to remove data forever. Magnetism is a hysteresis loop phenomenon {think of a spring toggle; it will only move if you push it hard enough, then the same spring you were fighting against snaps it into its new position}. There is a slight difference between a "1 that used to be a 0" and a "1 that was always a 1", and there's a corresponding slight difference between a "0 that always was a 0" and a "0 that used to be a 1" -- but that, by design, isn't apparent to the disk read head. (Think: the same few hundred MB of disk get repeatedly overwritten when it's used as a swapfile. Data surviving overwrites would lead to all manner of reliability problems.)

You can usually get some fairly random data from /dev/dsp - if all the inputs are turned up full whack with nothing plugged into them, then you will get a nice mix of static and power hum that ought not to contain any discernible pattern.

A "1 that used to be a 0, and before that a 1" and a "1 that used to be a 0, and before that a 0" are almost certainly indistinguible. One write ago you might be able to recover, but two writes ago you haven't got much chance. Perhaps if you extracted the platters, you might be able to find some remnants of data on them ..... but you'd have to do a lot of work to reconstruct it. Unless you struck gold straight away, you'd have to wade through a hell of a lot of crap reconstructing the drive's own low level structure and the OS's file format before you work out what order the recovered zeros and ones should even go in.

Once the data is as close to unrecoverable as won't make much difference, any extra effort you make is wasted. Sure, there are going to be one or two gems out there; but most people's data isn't that valuable, or can be had elsewhere for less effort. Think about it: Names and addresses are published in phone books and electoral registers. Identity numbers / SSNs are not secret. Nor are bank account numbers -- they're on every cheque you write. Credit card numbers are only valid for two years. Medical records of strangers are an interesting read, but not terrifically useful for anything interesting. If you're utterly paranoid, it might be worth doing partial random writes before storing any data on a new drive -- so if someone really can determine the first thing ever written to the drive, it would be nonsense. "Underwrite" each sector a random number of times, of course. Of course, if you have an encrypted file system, only the encryption key need be erased securely.

So, having applied the laws of physics and seen that getting rid of data isn't that hard (and could be implemented almost trivially at the OS level; but not being able to recover data might conceivably be worse than being able to recover it, what with everyone getting used to the idea of a magical 'undo' button), let's turn the question around and look at it from the other side:

Who gets fat on persuading people that they need to physically destroy used hard disk drives? And why? Let's see .....

• Hard drive manufacturers - they will obviously sell more new drives if people can't buy second-hand ones.
• Data recovery companies - they make money persuading people they can recover data from anything.
• Secure data disposal consultants - they can charge big money under the colour of authority.
• The Government - misinforming the populace is a centuries-old tradition. Documenting a data disposal procedure that is actually overkill might suggest to the Enemy that you have the technology to recover from anything less.

Anyway, if recovering overwritten data really worked -- or even only half-worked -- someone would, by now, have tried to use it for a "drive space expander" utility. The kind of thing that would probably be advertised by SPAM.

Re:interesting question

[yarbo]

0s and 1s aren't always written to exactly the same place. Read heads aren't enough to discern the difference, you need more sensitive measurement tools.

Re: shred

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, simply bury a bunch of hard drives, and chuck a layer of radioactive crap on top of them. The radioactivity should slowly degauss the platters, and time will take care of the validity of whatever's left. In the meantime, anybody coming into hospital with radiation poisoning is a suspect data thief.

Now can I patent this idea?

What's wrong with dd(1)?

[SpaghettiPattern]

Yeah, what's wrong with dd(1)?

DOD Specs aren't

[Anonymous Coward]

The oft-cited DOD specs aren't. When the military wants to make sure a drive cannot be read, the procedure is physical destruction of the media, not wiping the disk.

Trust me, I've had plenty of fun with sledge hammers, sandpaper, and degaussing magnets over the years.

Peace.

SCSI versus IDE low level formatting

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey:

I'm an ignoramous, so forgive me if this is a silly question. I seem to recall hearing that IDE drives couldn't be low-level formatted to the degree that SCSI drives could.

True? False? Part true but wrong-headed?

Thanks.

Makes no sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Why destroy the network cards and motherboards?

Top Secret

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a SparcStation off of eBay a little while ago. Upon receiving the workstation, I popped the top to discover a hard drive with an orange Top Secret sticker affixed. I have yet to hook the thing up to a monitor and see if there really is anything on the drive.

Re:Top Secret

[Anonymous Coward]

You're going to go to jail. We'll be knocking on your door shortly

Sincerely,
The Government

shameless plug

[nester]

wipe.sf.net

Total Destruction

[neccoant]

I work for a hospital, so we have to satisfy HIPAA regulations when disposing of hard drives. When a PC is junked, we ship it to the warehouse, where it is stripped of RAM, if it is still useful, and the hard drive. The hard drives are then fdisked, formatted, and put in a cardboard box. Once we get over twenty hard drives, out come the hammers, and there go the drives. It is overwhelmingly satisfying to hit a "fragile!" sticker with a hammer. Once the platters are cracked through or shattered, the drives are reboxed, the box is taped, and it goes out with the rest of the computer trash (perhaps to recycling.) Though this isn't perfect, anyone who gets the data off of those platters is likely to get it no matter what we do.

Mod Parent up

[sepluv]

This is common sense. Maybe stating the obvious but not a troll.

data out the doors

[Anonymous Coward]

Drives leaving our site go through the drill press before exiting the doors.

Autoclave... I'm late to the party here so this..

[the_rajah]

may be a dupe. It's not that hard to do a wipe of the HD.. I use a nice little utility on a floppy called Autoclave The only down-side is that it takes a while to do a high level over write of a large drive. If you're in a hurry, then take the sledge hammer approach...literally.

"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain

DoD Standards = destroy hard drives

[mgargett]

The new DoD standard is that no wipe software is good enough, you've got to destroy the hard drives if they contain anything sensitive and above. Basically, that's everything the DoD or DHS does. So, when machines are turned in now, hard drives are degaussed and then put in a shredder. And I've got to tell you, the hard drive shredder is one cool thing. It makes hard drive confetti.

Re:I Am NOT a "diabetic"

[The Almighty Dave]

From Dictionary.com:

diabetic
adj.

1. Of, relating to, having, or resulting from
diabetes: diabetic patients; a diabetic coma.
2. Intended for use by a person with diabetes:
diabetic candy.

n.

A person who has diabetes.

You are a diabetic.

Old hard-drives and pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a way of telling which sub-genre of pr0n a second-hand hard-drive seller is into just by looking at them or geting to know them? Armed with this knowledge, I don't have to bother with any downloads and save loads of time and money.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Shred is still your friend if you use windows

[rednox]

Just boot from a Knoppix CD, and shred your hard drive from there.

I had a windows 2000 laptop with a bad hard drive that would no longer even boot. I had to send the old hard drive back to Dell. I used this method to securely erase it before I sent it back.

I was pretty impressed that shred could still do its thing without crashing even though the drive was having continuous write failures. There was probably some data left in the bad sectors, though, but that's much better than sending back a drive full of my data!

Pointsec sells drive encryption software...

[DangerTenor]

Just so you know, the study was conducted by Pointsec, who make a fair bit of money selling software which encrypts the entire hard drive. So, it wasn't exactly an impartial study!

Low Supplies

[Anonymous Coward]

That's no code. Due to this week's increase in onald Reagan headlines and stories, the^e's been a sho#tage of the letta 'R'. Please limit use until p*oduction meets demand.

Process not trivial at all.

[nlinecomputers]

A company shouldn't let a disk off the premises without wiping it themselves -- it's a trivial process, as many other posts are detailing their favorite methids I won't bother.

Well the problem is the process is NOT trivial. To do a multipass wipe that meets DOD or better standards is very time consuming. I DOD wiped my 40gb harddrive using Boot'N Nuke and it took 18 hours to complete. In house IT staff must be able to setup, wipe, and then dispose of the system. If this is part of a workstation rollout that could mean hundreds of extra man-hours to secure the data. At that rate it becomes cheaper to simply physically destroy the hard drives or at least outsoure the job to a company that does this kind of work. But you risk trusting the data to third parties.

Re:Process not trivial at all.

[1u3hr]

Well the problem is the process is NOT trivial. To do a multipass wipe that meets DOD or better standards is very time consuming. I DOD wiped my 40gb harddrive using Boot'N Nuke and it took 18 hours to complete....could mean hundreds of extra man-hours

Doesn't matter how much time it takes to complete. Only takes a man-minute per machine. Pop in a boot floppy or CD with the software of your choice, turn it on. Let it scrub away overnight (or for a week if you prefer). Come back the next day, eject the disk, send the PC on its way.

Re:Process not trivial at all.

[nlinecomputers]

Well except the computers take deskspace away from units that need repair, upgrades, or other duties that the IT staff has to perform. They can't blow away the disks in somebody's cubical. You got to have room and time to setup this AND attend to the routine duties of the IT staff. (Which anit as big as it use to be in most shops.) Also if this is an upgrade of a lot of workstations then management will be wanting to sell the equipiment fast. This gets outsourced for a reason.

Re:Process not trivial at all.

[1u3hr]

Well except the computers take deskspace away from units that need repair, upgrades, or other duties that the IT staff has to perform. They can't blow away the disks in somebody's cubical.

Before you were talking about manhours. Now it's deskspace. And I don't see why you couldn't "blow it away" in someone's cubicle. Start it at the end of the week. Take it out Monday when you bring in the new one.

This gets outsourced for a reason

As mentioned earlier, you trust someone else to delete your data, you take your chances, that's what the story was about. Spend a minute per machine and do it right.

But it's your job, you choose.

IBM ReFurb Drives can have data on them.

[314m678]

I used to work at a huge break-fix operation, we got refurbished drives from IBM and other companies that would boot up an OS when we plugged them in.

Just heat it above the curie temperature

[misterpies]

No need to shoot, drop or drive over your hard drive. The simple solution is found by physics, not engineering. All you need to do to erase any magnetic media is heat it above its Curie temperature. This is the temperature at which thermal fluctuations destroy any magnetic order in the material. All magnetic information is completely destroyed.

From nosing around Google, it seems that the Curie temperature for most hard drive platters is around 200C (392F). A domestic oven can manage that easily. So just take out the platters from your hard drive (leave out plastic bits which might melt) and stick them in the oven for an hour.

If someone came up with a HD with heat-resistant, removable platters, you could just bake them to erase, then replace them and have a completely balnk, unformatted drive again.

My solution

[TheSync]

My Solution

Autoclave

[bobbabemagnet]

We use a program at my work called autoclave that is DoD compliant. It boots linux on a single floppy and erases the entire hard drive. Works on very old machines, too.

http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave/

Misconception

[ThisIsFred]

This is a bit scary considering all of these drives were supposedly formatted and sold for surplus by major companies (although few of us actually use the multiple formatting standards of the DoD)

This one sentence explains it all. You can format it a thousand times, but the data will still be intact. Formatting (as the term applies to modern OSes) just clears out the areas of the disk that contain entries pointing to the actual blocks of data, unless it's low-level formatting, (which I don't recommend you do).

That's sad. Professional techs don't know the difference. I understood this the difference when I was a child, so I guess it's true that "professional" only means "I get paid". The correct procedure is to overwrite every bit of data on the disk, multiple times. Nine times, twelve times if you're really paranoid. No special software needed if you've got Unix/BSD/Linux around.

cat /dev/zero > /dev/whatever

Re:I Am NOT a "diabetic"

[Kosgrove]

You are an anal rententive douchebag. Who cares?

How to protect secure data...

[Anonymous Coward]

Install Windows ME on the hard drive, when people see it on boot up, they will automatically wipe the drive.

Easy Security Soluation

[nonsense28sal]

Step 1: Remove hard drive Step 2: Place hard drive on hard surface Step 3: Procure hammer Step 4: Repeatedly bang hammer on hard drive until only small pieces are left Step 5: Security problem solved In all seriousness, I do not sell or surplus hard drives. I physically destroy them. With the low cost of large drives now days, there is no reason to resell them. Plus if you destroy them, you get the added benefit of letting off some frustration. "Teach them to open brittenynudeshots.jpg.pif AGAIN...."

Buy a drive....Goto Jail

[Sir_Dill]

I have heard stories of people going to jail for kiddie porn that was found on harddrives that were purchased from third parties.

The case in point that I heard about involved an individual who got raided for other reasons, when the authorities seized his equipment they didn't find what they expected to find, however they did find this other drive with kiddie porn on it and they put him in jail because of it.

Its not just privacy issues that I would be worried about....once you buy the disk you are legally responsible for its contents.

Gives a whole new meaning to buyer beware.

Tell me

[Z00L00K]

why I'm not even surprised...

Re:Tell me

[compro01]

beacuse this is old news perhaps?

i have seen this so many times and places....

but some of the comments on "secure data erapure" methods are nice.

most popular seems to be Drill+reallybighammer=secure data deletion

what people overlook...

[justins]

Simply writing zeros to every location on the hard drive that stores data doesn't completely erase the data. That is the magnetic field of the bits are not set at exactly '0'. Slight variations in the magnetic material, write head field strength, and positioning all contribute to increase the odds of data being recoverable.

This is just one of the problems. One problem which is really insurmountable with software is what to do about data that is, during the life of the drive:
1) Written to a sector of the disk
2) said sector is discovered by the drive electronics to be going flaky
3) the drive moves the data to a new sector, for safety
4) the old sector(s) are marked bad and no longer used by the drive
5) the data is now inaccessible

If you're paranoid enough to use the methods of wiping that ostensibly go beyond what recovery is possible with software and are meant to protect against recovery with special equipment, well, you need to just destroy the drive and skip the whole software wiping rigamarole, since it will never accomplish what you want 100%. If you've got access to replacement drive firmware maybe you've got some other options...

Re:what people overlook...

[Mycroft_VIII]

In a word, OUCH.
That's two improvements in hdd tech that missed.
Time for the trully paranoid to switch to LEAD foil in thier hats. And all the three letter agenencies to switch disposal methodes to include a launch on a big rocket with a course that impacts the sun.
Lets face it, if someone wants to know what data you keep on your hard drive, they'll get it unless you have the resources and experience of one of the said TLAs. What with tempest gear, laser mikes, and alien mind rays for all I know.

Mycroft

THAT IS BULLSHIT

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure about just touching the blood, but if it enters your bloodstream you are definitely at risk.
ASK A DOCTOR ABOUT THIS! BUT DO NOT BELIEVE UNINFORMED ./ IDIOTS.

Thermite

[AmISure]

Has always worked well for me. Whip it up, pour it on, stick in the fuse, and light! Presto instant slag and unreadable HD. Please try and ensure that you don't burn through anything valuable below said HD.

Re:Slightly OT

[Halthar]

You might want to check and see if there are some caps going bad on the MoBo. If one of them is starting to go, then chances are that some of the others are probably going to start going soon as well. Better to catch it now IMHO.

Yes, this has happened to me before. It also does assume you are talking about an onboard controller on the MoBo, and not an add-on card.

So that this isn't completely off topic. I still have all the drives I have ever owned as well. Including a 90 Gig Conner that came out of a (at the time) new 386DX 33MHz machine that had a Math Co. It still amazes me that I paid 3,500 USD for that machine. I will say this though, after all these years, that drive STILL works, slowly, but it still works.

Re:I Am NOT a "diabetic"

[The Almighty Dave]

Did you mean anal retentive douchebag?

Who cares?

It looks like three of us care enough to post a comment.

DOD 5220.22-M, the RCMP guidelines, and friends

[valdis]

The current DOD standard for contractors says thusly:

Pages 14 and 15 note methods "a, b, d, and m" sanitizing fixed drives, and continues:

"d. Overwrite all addressable locations with a character, its complement, then a random character and verify. THIS METHOD IS NOT APPROVED FOR SANITIZING MEDIA THAT CONTAINS TOP SECRET INFORMATION."

Note this applies to DOD contractors, and other rules probably apply to DOD, military, and the CIA/NSA/NRO/etc intelligence community.

The obvious implication is that the 3 verified passes are sufficient to render the information not worth recovering for Confidential and Secret, but that Top Secret info is still potentially recoverable within cost/benefit constraints for the opponent. Remember - for many things (except possibly some weapons systems info) you don't need to guarantee the opponent can't recover the information, you merely have to make the cost of recovery greater than the benefit they gain from the secret.

Oh, and the Canadian RCMP TSSIT OPS-II says: "Must first be checked for correct functioning and then have all storage areas overwritten once with the binary digit ONE, once with the binary digit ZERO and once with a single numeric, alphabetic or special character, " and again, not for Top Secret - for that, they recommend contacting somebody for special instructions/handling.

misspellings

[Anonymous Coward]

Ack!!! You're one of them!!

"mispellings" indeed!

They erase the hard drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

My company got liquidated, and the people disposing of the assets claimed that all the hard drives of machines had been wiped.

Including the Sun systems, which they thought were PC's.

Oh yeah, and including the Mac systems, which they advertised were made by "DELL".

One employee bought their machine back... not a thing had been done to it. The consultants just get paid big bucks to say they did it.

I have recovered stuff off old HD myself.

[hurfy]

CC numbers is not the only thing recoverable... In Fact that is where i got my first VIRUS ! Doh! Yup, got a pallet of old computers and was putting parts together to make a couple complete ones. Most of the drives werent even formatted. I got shipping programs and stuff too like someone else. BUT, one of them seemed to have the michelanglo virus. Found it when i took a boot or data transfer disk back to main computer and norton threw a fit. Of course by then it was on all the drives and floppies i was building :( So, if ya all are gonna dumpster dive watch what you plug the stuff into :)

low level?

[mgcarley]

Wouldn't you rather zero-fill it? I know Seagate has a tool for this (and other functions), and I'm sure Maxtor and Western Digital do as well.

Re:I Am NOT a "diabetic"

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you think "diabetic" means? It means a person with diabetes. It's not like you have to walk around with a white sticker saying, "diabetic," is it? So why complain? If it's medically necessary let whoever needs to know know that you're a diabetic, otherwise who cares?

Re:Slightly OT

[Qzukk]

You mean 90MB drive, right? I don't think Conner as a company made it past the 1GB or so mark ;)

How do I go about checking capacitors? I know theres equipment out there to test them when they're not attached to anything, but is there some way to tell when they're still attached to the motherboard?