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Memories of a Media Card
twistedmoney99 writes "Anyone who has upgraded their digital camera probably has a few older, incompatible media cards lying around — so why not post them on Ebay? Well, if you do, be sure to properly wipe them because the digital voyeurs are watching. Seth Fogie at InformIT.com purchased a bunch of used cards from Ebay and found recoverable data on most of them. Using the freely available PhotoRec application, he was able to extract pictures, movies, and more from apparently formatted cards. The picture is clear — wipe anything that can store digital data before getting rid of it."
It adds to the value on auction sites. A lot of people are willing to pay a fortune to see images of my dick.
Memory cards do not have nearly as strong of a memory effect as hard drives. With a hard drive you can write and rewrite multiple times and still have data recovered by someone willing to spend the time, effort, and money. But memory cards are much harder. You could be relatively sure of safety if you just:
1. Delete everything on the card.
2. Fill the card with something not private (maybe a text file that just repeats the same character).
3. Delete everything on the card.
4. If you're paranoid do 2 and 3 again.
If you don't have a computer handy, you can accomplish step 2 by taking photos of a blank sheet of paper or a lenscap or something of that sort.
I've recovered photos by hand for family members who've accidentally nuked their memory cards (did it the hard way with a hex editor, dd and cut). So wouldn't dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/ memory-card bs=1K count= card-size-in-kib suffice?
I had a 4-month-old 250gb hard drive die of heatstroke within a fanless drive enclosure. The drive had, shall we say, material of an "educational" nature. (ahem)
Anyway, I didn't want to release said material to the general public at [insert HD manufacturer here], so I abandoned any warranty recovery and just physically destroyed the drive. So much for that $100.
As for erasing solid state media, I'd feel perfectly safe simply overwriting it with zeroes, one time over.
I realize years ago magnetic media were written sparsely (inefficiently) with sloppy positioning mechanisms, but those days are long gone. I'd be really impressed to see somebody recover overwritten data on a hard drive instead of just talking about it.
As for flash memory, I'll believe it when I see it.
As for leaking information through discarded camera memory cards in the first, place, it's about the 1000th thing down my list of privacy concerns, way down below "binoculars." If you want to see pictures of random people's snapshots of each other, they're all over the web. How many of us really use our digicams to capture super-secret info? I just can't bring myself to care when I know databases of thousands of credit card numbers and SSNs are being bought and sold on the black market.
I'm sure a lot of people don't wipe the camera cards because they don't care if someone gets photos of their pets or disney vacation or drunken stupor. They figure most people - ie. those not interested in writing an alarmist privacy article - will simply wipe and use the card. Unless you're a celebrity, or have a stalker why would you care? You're probably photographed more by traffic cameras these days anyway.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If it's data you care about someone else getting a hold of, I would recommend using Thermite. It's a wonderful, all purpose, cleanser of just about everything.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Better (and more convenient) than dd'ing from /dev/urandom is wipe(1). It will, at your option, overwrite the disk using 34 different byte patterns, 8 of which are random.
Its man page is also the only one I know of that uses the phrases "rising totalitarianism", "Department of Homeland Security", and "THIS IS AN EXTREMELY DANGEROUS THING TO DO".
"What are the best methods for removing almost any record of data?"
Have Chuck Norris give it a roundhouse kick.
When I first started at NASA the methodology was to use something like Norton's Erase, put it on Government Erase (three passes of writing first all ones, then all zeros, then all ones again, then doing half tracks). When Windows 98 came along we still used Norton's Erase but it had a different algorithm which was quite good too. When Windows 2000 came along we were no longer trusted to erase everything properly and we had to send the disk drives to a centralized location where they were wiped before being sold. When Windows XP came along we were told to just take a hammer to them. This was because the government had made so many cutbacks that there wasn't any money to properly erase the disk drives.
:-/
On a side note: When I first started working at NASA we had a budget of well over a million dollars. We got rid of all of the really big mainframes, and minis, and went to micros. Our budget was reduced to somewhere around $500,000.00 a year (about a third of what we originally were given each year). What I'd like to know is - whatever happened to all of that money? We certainly never go pay raises which equaled the amount of money lost. So where did it go? The answer might be a bit more surprising than anyone really wants to know about.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
In a nutshell, for hard drives, "If commercially-available SPM's are considered too expensive, it is possible to build a reasonably capable SPM for about US$1400, using a PC as a controller". So it is in the reach of the hobbyist to recover up to around the last 20 items recorded on any magnetic media (easier for floppies, harder as drives become denser). On solid state memory, I believe an electron microscope is needed for analysis. Still, data that has been in one location in RAM for more than five minutes is in theory recoverable.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
Throwing away or destroying manufactured items when they are working and reusable is irresponsible, because it does not attempt to minimize environmental impact.
Used items that are still in demand should be reused as much as possible, to reduce the demand for manufacturing these items (with all the power and waste involved in that) and the size of landfills.
I'd just keep the damn thing. You know that as soon as you sell it you'll have a desperate need for it. That's just how the world works.
Ahh.. Hard disks - With all the above posts, I thought you said hard dicks for a second there.
Lindsay Blanton
RadioReference.com
From the article:
In addition, the fact that some of the cards contained undeleted images is a bit disconcerting. At a bare minimum media card owners should have deleted the viewable images.
Why? Why should they have, if they don't care who saw them? As they said, the images were all of clothed people and disney world and things, worth nothing to anyone but the owner.
Privacy just for the sake of privacy seems to have taken hold of too many people, who do not stop to think - is there any point to privacy in this instance?
Obviously if people did not want images being seen they should remove them; I just object to catiioning users against leaving images with the vague fear that "someone may see thier images" when that may not matter at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley