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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.
To whoever bought my old hard drive on eBay, those pictures were all for research purposes only.
Sincerely
Peter Townshend
You know, there are signs on pools for this very reason.
I hate sigs.
http://www.killdisk.com/eraser.htm
Its worth its weight in gold.
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
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...
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
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.
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.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
has taken a "hard dive".
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. - HST
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!
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.
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.
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.
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
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.
- 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.
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
-- You can't drink all day. (Unless you start in the morning...)
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.
$cat
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.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
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 ;).
3dinfo@maficstudios.com
http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave/
Works like a charm. And it has various levels of paranoia to choose from.
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.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
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
No, because these days you're not supposed to do the low-level formatting yourself. That's done by the manufacturer.
- remove drive from machine,
- remove screws from drive,
- split HD case open,
- smash to bits.
No data leaks. Really! Kind of brings a tear to the eye of the guy with the screwdriver and hammer though.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
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
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
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
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.
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...
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
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.
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.
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.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
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.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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: :-D
/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" !!
-- If you actually say LOL instead of laughing, maybe it's time to go outside! --
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.
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.
The Cheese Stands Alone.
Horses don't normally wear clothes, you know.
... 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".
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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.
Who is John Cabal?
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.
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.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
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.
Diabetes, either type, cannot be spread to another person by blood contact.
...
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".
Xenu loves you!
... 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!
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
You can usually get some fairly random data from
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
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
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.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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.
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.
May we never see th