A New Technique to Quickly Erase Hard Drives

RockDoctor writes "Stories about 'wiped' hard drives appearing on eBay (and other channels) and being stuffed with personably-identifiable data are legion; rarer are spy planes having to land on enemy territory, but it happened in 2001 to a US spy plane over an un-declared enemy (China, and that's a topic in itself). Dark Reading reports the development of a technique to securely wipe a hard drive in seconds, and which is safe for flying. (The safe for flying criterion rules out things like fun with packing the drives in thermite. Also thermiting the drives may not erase the platters to the standard required, which is moderately interesting itself."

Comments

First question:

[fluch]

Why wasn't the content of the harddrive encrypted?

Re:Joe does it

[Anonymous Coward]

That is mostly urban legend. There is a theoretical possibility that overwritten data could be reconstructed, even several layers "deep", but in practice there is no commercially available service capable of that stunt. If you know of one, name it (with references that they can do it). If they could do it, they would have to have technology available which could instantly multiply the space on these platters. It's not just a matter of having a reader with twice as good a SNR as a standard RW head. The writing harddisk doesn't just add signal, it also adds noise. The SNR on the platter will be barely good enough to read the signal of the last write. Otherwise the harddisk manufacturer could have made a bigger harddisk at the same price. The economics of the situation make recovering a previous write unlikely. The real problem with deletion by overwriting data is that it is really slow. It takes hours per disk.

Instead of worrying about residual magnetism which can at best be detected by government agencies with extreme funding, people should simply never write unencrypted confidential information anywhere. This also protects you in cases where you didn't schedule the removal of a harddisk, i.e. theft.

China??

[nephridium]

rarer are spy planes having to land on enemy territory, but it happened in 2001 to a US spy plane over an un-declared enemy (China, and that's a topic in itself)

What's with all this hate mongering against China? Why was this totally OT snippet even up there anyway? To keep us reminded that there are "bad guys" out there and when we think about harddisks we also should be completely aware that we should be afraid, very afraid of an "undeclared" enemy?

China may have different attitudes and morals standards than the US, but they are doing many things right as well; more than western media tends to portray (e.g. according to the CIA world factbook China has a lower percentage of citizens suffering from poverty than the richest country in the world (namely the US)). I don't want to whitewash anything, but reading things like "undeclared enemy" in a tech article on an international website just pisses me off.