Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Unclean Military Hard Drives Sold On eBay

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the they-should-know-better dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Daily Mail reports, 'Highly sensitive details of a US military missile air defense system were found on a second-hand hard drive bought on eBay. The test launch procedures were found on a hard disk for the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) ground to air missile defense system, used to shoot down Scud missiles in Iraq. The disk also contained security policies, blueprints of facilities, and personal information on employees (including social security numbers) belonging to technology company Lockheed Martin — who designed and built the system.' Scary that they did not wipe it to Department of Defense standards, which I believe is wiping the whole disk and then writing 1010 all over it."

18 of 369 comments (clear)

  1. I have to wonder by Lord+Grey · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The article states that this finding was the result of a study where a few hundred drives (300+) were purchased from various places and then scanned.

    A spokesman for BT said they found 34 per cent of the hard disks scrutinised contained 'information of either personal data that could be identified to an individual or commercial data identifying a company or organisation.'

    Later:

    For a very large proportion of the disks we looked at we found enough information to expose both individuals and companies to a range of potential crimes such as fraud, blackmail and identity theft.

    Where are the corresponding crimes? If a third of the used hard drives on the market really contain such detailed personal or business information, wouldn't you think that at least one group of criminals would be buying as many of these drives as possible? Granted that there would be capital outlay, but a lot of that is recovered by selling the drives again through the vary same channels, and the risk of getting caught would be extremely low. Quantity of information is lower than with network-based methods (eg, keyloggers, sniffers, etc.) or other information-gathering methods, but I would think the quality of the gathered data would be much, much higher. Good enough to resell for a relatively high amount.

    It seems, to me, that there is a bit of hyperbole going on here.

    --
    // Beyond Here Lie Dragons
    1. Re:I have to wonder by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Where are the corresponding crimes? If a third of the used hard drives on the market really contain such detailed personal or business information, wouldn't you think that at least one group of criminals would be buying as many of these drives as possible?

      Uh, what makes you think that they aren't? Your comment is utterly devoid of value unless you can prove a negative somehow. Good luck!

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:I have to wonder by noundi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ... wouldn't you think that at least one group of criminals would be buying as many of these drives as possible?

      Well the black market is a quite complicated. The only groups with enough funding and enough motive to even try to obtain this information (disregarding the middlemen that you're mentioning) would be other nations. Let's say you're an exceptional nerd with enough skills to extract this data into usable form (I think it would be fair to say that many /.-ers fit or could fit this profile given some time to research). How would you go about selling this information to let's say North Korea? Who would you contact? Better yet, who would they allow you to speak to? I doubt you can just pick up the phone and ask the operator to "hook you up with the illest of Kim Jongs". But let's say you actually do get to speak with him (or anybody of importance really). How's your Korean? Ok final hypothesis, let's say you actually do speak Korean. What are you going to say? It's not like you're calling from AT&T to offer him 5$ less monthly fee if he subscribes to the service for 24 additional months.

      Basically I see where you're coming from but I wouldn't take the procedure so lightly. Plus there's possibly a lot more important information floating around somewhere that never "got in the wrong hands" as well.

      --
      I am the lawn!
    3. Re:I have to wonder by Hyppy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You're on the right track. Quite a few crimes of this nature are not reported, at least not publicly.

    4. Re:I have to wonder by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Do retorts like yours really pass for good reasoning on Slashdot?

      What makes you think that the Universe isn't containing within the eye of a pink singing elephant? Your view on the Universe is utterly devoid of value unless you can prove a negative somehow. Good luck!

      Concentrate carefully: when event e happens, we can make a list of events f_1...f_n that we think might lead to e. Let's hypothesise that one such event f_j leads to e. Our first mission is deductive - to demonstrate that f_j can lead to e, and that e can occur.

      Our second mission, however, is philosophical induction - has it actually been observed sufficiently often that f_j leads to e for us to assume that it is typical for f_j to lead to e?

      You've collected enough points to complete the first mission, and assumed that the second just magically happens. No Western philosophical approach follows the "well that could be the cause, and the set of prerequisites have occurred at least once, so who's to say it's not the cause?" line of argument. It could be used to argue so many nonsenses that the scientific approach would be overwhelmed.

    5. Re:I have to wonder by Lost+Race · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Your comment is utterly devoid of value unless you can prove a negative somehow. Good luck!

      "prove a negative"?

      Follow any of the links and never use that idiotic phrase again.

  2. Scary that they sold the disk at all by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You can wipe a disk with "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda" and nobody will get anything from it after that, but the problem isn't the technical feasibility of securely wiping a hard disk: It's a problem of procedure. If hard disks are sold, there's always going to be a mishap where disks which were supposed to be wiped are not and sold with the data intact. Also, why was this data not encrypted? Anyway, hard disks are just not worth enough to take these risks. Destroy the disks and do it in-house.

    1. Re:Scary that they sold the disk at all by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Degaussing a hard drive permanently damages it (if you can do it, that is). Not only will all servo information be lost, modern hard drives also store the firmware on the disks. Deleting the firmware significantly reduces the reuse potential and resale value of a hard disk.

    2. Re:Scary that they sold the disk at all by Orgasmatron · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Don't forget that modern drives use material with obscenely high coercivity so that the domains don't spontaneously flip their neighbors. If you use a magnet powerful enough to randomize the platters, you'll warp all the steel parts.

      --
      See that "Preview" button?
    3. Re:Scary that they sold the disk at all by jimicus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The problem with shred (and indeed any such utility) is that it doesn't account for application behaviour. What if some application that uses the file re-writes it - eg. because of some change to the file - to a different filehandle than the one the file was originally read from?

      What if at some point the file was read into memory and that memory was swapped out by the OS? There are lots of quite reasonable scenarios where there are fragments of the file sitting around indefinitely.

  3. Re:Unclean? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I agree. If you have sensitive data on a disk (or paper or anything else) DESTROY it. Fire is best and most useful but other methods are possible.

  4. Why not just destroy these disks? by JackassJedi · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why does the DoD not simply destroy the disks in question?

    --
    Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
  5. Re:please... by canix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It is possible that the people most likely to have the resources and expertise to do this (i.e. govt. security depts.) don't want to announce that they have this capability ...

  6. Who is really to blame? by sunking2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Did lockheed actually own these machines, or do they lease them? My guess is LM (like most larger companies) has a contract with someone like CSC/IBM/etc who actually owns, maintains, and replaces machines. This is probably where the ball was dropped. Every 3 years here CSC replaces 10s of thousands of PCs that they are itching to sell off before they depreciate into worthlessness. I can certainly see them taking short cuts, or missing a few. This is the problem with outsourcing IT infrastructure. They don't always really understand or care about the same thing as you.

  7. Re:Unclean? by Hyppy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Most DoD member units approve DBAN already. Especially when it's set to the platter-melting 35-pass Guttman Wipe.

    The problem is when someone DOESN'T follow proper procedures. Rules are great and all, but someone is always going to break them in some way

  8. Re:please... by WoLpH · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why would any company enter a challenge like that? What data recovery company would comply to this: "You also must publicly disclose in a reproducible manner the method(s) used to win the challenge."?

    Regardless of wheter it is possible or not, it is definately not worth the trouble for anyone.

  9. Re:please... by Hyppy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    $500 to recover a drive, eh? If I had a data recovery business, I'd hang up on you too. If you want people to take you seriously, then perhaps you should present yourself in a serious manner. Offering $500 and a basement-made "King of Data Recovery" title is not a serious challenge. It's a slap in the face to any legitimate data recovery business to be "challenged" like that.

  10. Perhaps we should find new ways to motivate them by AnalPerfume · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Every time a piece of hardware which wasn't properly cleaned to the recommended levels, the individual responsible for letting it leave the premises should be held accountable....personally. How about sharing state secrets with the enemy? You can't know who it was destined for so there's every possibility it will go overseas. To my knowledge this carries a harsh sentence, but we can allow a prison sentence if they co-operate with the authorities and ensure the command level personnel are also charged.

    My guess is that most of this stuff happens through employee laziness, and contractor unaccountability. If you have lobbyists lairing in government to ensure that you keep the contracts no matter what and are able to hide anything under the "national security" red herring then why bother enforcing rules like wiping stuff properly? The idea of being held PERSONALLY responsible, with potential jail time will make people stop and think, specially if the command level have no loophole to blame their underlings for anything the press find out about.