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The Great Zero Challenge Remains Unaccepted
An anonymous reader writes "Not even data recovery companies will accept The Great Zero Challenge and only four months remain! We've all heard how easily data can be recovered from hard drives. We're told to make multiple overwrites with random data, to degauss drives and even physically destroy them just to be extra safe. Let's get the word out. The challenge is almost over! It's put up or shut up time. Can you recover the data?"
Based on nothing more than personal suspicion, I think many professional recovery firms may be in the business of simply running expensive tools that scan through the partition and file table area and perhaps even the entire disk to locate data that has either been marked erased or had references removed (for a full disk scan) and then restoring it. Perhaps they'll also move the spindle from a dead drive into a new case to complete the operation, but I doubt there are many companies that will actually do electron force microscopy for you and even fewer that will do it at anything other than an astronomical fee. Powerful recovery tools can be purchased for a few hundred dollars now anyway. My opinion is that the recovery business is a focus around confidence that a professional will be doing the recovery and that you or your employees won't worsen the situation. In the event that a drive with critical data fails and you don't have a backup, who wants to be the person responsible for damaging the disk during recovery?
Anyway, IMHO this whole debate should be moot by now. If you want to secure your drive use full disk encryption (now freely available in TrueCrypt) and when it comes to destroying the data just overwrite the header area a thousand times with random garbage. It will take only a second or two, and the whole drive will be useless to anyone.
Of course it would also be nice if more manufacturers were producing encrypted disks as standard with verified schemes (there have been some lemons purporting to be secure that really aren't) so that we wouldn't have to do encryption in software.
So the prize for winning is a $60 hard drive, plus $40? Damn, I don't know why people aren't just jumping all over that!
Also, disassembling the drive is against the rules of the challenge, unless you're a "established data recovery business ... or a National government law enforcement or intelligence agency".
This "challenge" is stupid.
Interestingly, the most important thing is missing from the summary -- the prize. So, what the prize is you ask?
An incredible, unbelievable, astonishing and amazing amount of... wtf... fourty (40) US Dollars? Yes, you heard that right! No wonder nobody has shown any interest in participating.
Full quote from the site: Should someone win, they get to keep the drive. They also will receive $40.00 USD and the title "King (or Queen) of Data Recovery".
Ugly unprofessional website, a prize purse of $40USD (plus the hard drive), restrictions that the drive can't be disassembled.....I can't imagine why they're having trouble getting interest. Raise the purse to $10,000 and you might have something.
In addition, according to Wikipedia, what he proposes is actually impossible, at the very least an electron microscope would be needed.
Can't say I'm entirely disappointed by this story, though. At least I learned something that I was ignorant of before.
Qxe4
First of all, do data recovery firms ever *claim* they can recover from a zeroed drive? No, they don't. The claim is that government-level forensic analysis *might* be able to recover data with only a single overwrite, with very sensitive expensive equipment. Not terribly surprising the FBI wouldn't take them up on this challenge.
Second of all, someone is supposed to waste a lot of time and money for just a cheap drive and a piece of paper from some entity no one has ever heard of?
And they're doing this to "prove" that this type of data recovery can't be done?
This has to be the lamest challenge that's ever been issued.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It's about money.
Since the "reward" offered seems to be less than the regular fee that a company would charge for such, why would any recovery company waste resources on it?
The challenge does not seem well designed. First of, the person attempting it has to pay postage both ways, deposit $60 with the organization hosting the challenge and forfeit the deposit if the drive is not returned in the same condition as it was when sent (how are you going to use a scanning tunneling microscope if you don't take it apart), they only get three days, and the reward is a whopping $40.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I would guess that lack of measurable incentive to do the recovery is what they are seeing. why the hell would a professional bother doing this for $40? I know I wouldn't. Put up some real money and your data will be recovered in no time.
Okay, here are my 3 reasons why a company would not accept this challenge:
(1) economical:
- I am asked to mail 60 USD to a random address, who claim they will return it to me if I send the harddisk back. This is a risk (how do I know it is not a scam?)
- In any case, I lose shipping charges both ways
- Maximum gain is 40$, plus an obscure web site calls me King of data recovery.
- Risk + Cost >> Gain
(2) International
I am asked to ship a US Postal money. A WHAT? Hello, creditcard? Paypal? Normal internaional cheque?
(3) Disassembly
All reasons I've heard for doing something more than dd is that there might be residual magnetic charge on the platter that is ignored by the filesystem. According to the rules of engagement, only some weird collection of institutions ("established data recovery business located in the United States of America" or "National government law enforcement or intelligence agency (NSA, CIA, FBI)") may disassemble the drive. How am I going to detect residual charge if I cannot disassemble it?
The last arguments compounds the first two, as only US Companies can disasseble, and disassembly voids the deposit, meaning I am certainly out 60$.
Next time that they want to be "noble and just to dispel myths, falsehoods and untruths", they should make a challenge that is actually interesting to any party to pick up.
Given my general level of paranoia, I recommend overwriting zeros, and five times with a cryptographically secure pseudo-random sequence. Recent developments at the National Institute of Standards and Technology with electron-tunneling microscopes suggest even that might not be enough. Honestly, if your data is sufficiently valuable, assume that it is impossible to erase data complete off magnetic media. Bur or shred the media; it's cheaper to buy media new than to lose your secrets.
Because all data recovery companies have electron-tunneling microscopes on hand for recovery and aren't just running a Linux distro with a modified ext3fs to ignore "deleted" inodes. The longest AES key I've cracked is 28 bits (in Python, no less!). Yet we still use a minimum of 128, more likely 256. It's not the guys running recover I'm worried about. It's the spooks with electron f'ing microscopes and a direct connection to AT&T.
Three rights make a left. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly.
If you were a data recovery company, you would gain an ENORMOUS reputation if you were to complete the challenge. And the cost? Shipping.
That is the cheapest publicity they would ever receive... and what publicity they would receive!
1. if you don't accept this simple the challenge, you definitely scam your customers. Some will take notice, and you lose more.
2. if you accept the challenge and WIN, then you get free advertising. (If you accept but lose, you still get some bad PR, but at least you can say the drive was fake).
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
The few people who MIGHT have the capability to look beyond what is written on the drive and see patterns remaining from previous data are most likely the ones who would prefer that the concept remain vague and unproven.
The folks that can do this aren't closely interested in what few comments a bunch of /. folks can make about them.
Get a clue. If an organization does this type of work, 1st they're not going to advertise it. 2nd they'll have so much work, they don't need to advertise.
Wake the hell up and get out of VB and java land.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
16 Systems website looks like is a web-page assignment from an 1980's HTML tutorial.
The services listed are BASIC/Javascript end-of-chapter exercises.
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
Along those lines, I once knew a professor who claimed that the NSA was doing automated keyword scanning on the national phone system in the late seventies. There's quite a lot of uncertainty about just what their capabilities are and aren't... and presumably they like it that way.
So you're not allowed to (for example) exploit redundancy or error checking on the drive itself? If dd wrote zeros, that's what'll be read unles you can get "lower" than normal drive access.
This challenge has nothing to do with the security of your wipe. Rather, it has everything to do with dd successfully writing zeros given normal access.
Wikileaks, no DNS
The German computer magazine c't did try to get a disk that was overweritten once with zeros recoverd two years ago or so. All data recovery companies they contacted (all the major ones) said they could not do it and that it was likely impossible. So this is not newa at all. Even Gutman had an addendum that says tomething close for modern disks.
The source of all these stories is that it used to be possible, when disc coatings were more advanced than r/w head and electronics. That is not the case anymore. It is very likely that you cannot put much more data on the disk than a moder HDD does. That also means that a single overwrite is an unrecoverable deletion. Keep in mind, that due to the particulars of the modulation, an all zero overwrite does not take up less of the surfaces data storage cabaliluty as a fully random overwrite.
Basically the pople that claim recovery is possible are one or so decades behind the times. Nothing new.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You would do it once for less than $40 if you thought it would make you $400,000 over the next year in new business brought in because you proved you could do it. You would do it at your own expense. You would pay $1,000 to prove you could do it!
THAT is the whole point, in a nutshell. Anybody who could do this would have people lining up at their doors, wanting to lay down money for the service. Failing to even try to prove that they can do it demonstrates only one thing: they can't. The $40 thing is nothing but a red herring. Any company that could, would.
So bottom line is that you could send the drive in to Western Digital, and they could probably recover the raw data with about 90% accuracy.
That's a pretty impressive number, to just pull out of your ass.
sic transit gloria mundi