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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.
> Interestingly, the most important thing is missing from the summary
Not only that, but also the fabulous restriction:
"You may not [...] disassemble the drive"
This is ridiculous. A drive overwritten with zero data will, by definition, returns 0s through ATA commands. The reason why some people overwrite sensible data several time is to guard against a possible scanning transmission electron microscopy, which, of course would need the disk to be disassembled to be performed.
How can this ends on slashdot ? Don't know...
Actually they also ask you to tell how you did it. Even though they claim it is not a scam it seems like a scam in the sense that they after this weird experiment have proven that recovery is impossible.
It is like me setting up a challenge - can ketchup stains be removed from my white t-shirt?
Send a self-addressed, postage-paid box you pay shipping both ways with packaging material to the address listed below along with a sixty $60 USD deposit United States Postal Service Money Order only and I will mail the t-shirt to you.
If you can remove the stain you get to keep the t-shirt and I will give you the amazing amount of money $50 and the right to become "official stain remover". Btw, if you can't prove you are a established ketchup removal business - you cannot use water or any other fluid.
If this challenge is not taken within a year I have the right to tell the world that the worlds dry cleaners can't remove ketchup stains. The whole clothes cleaning industry is a hoax.
That is the cheapest publicity they would ever receive... and what publicity they would receive!
Yes, what publicity they would receive? :) I've never heard of 16systems.com before, their site is barebones with almost no articles. I dare say they caught a lucky break with this Slashdot article. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that there is no obvious publicity to be had (before now). And should recovery firms respond to everyone with a small website who issues a challenge?