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Reporters Find US Gov't Data In Ghana Market
narramissic writes "'Hundreds and hundreds of documents about government contracts,' were found on a hard drive purchased at a market in Ghana for the bargain basement price of $40, said Peter Klein, an associate professor with the University of British Columbia, who led an investigation into the global electronic waste business for the PBS show Frontline. The hard drive had belonged to US government contractor Northrop Grumman and in a made-for-TV ironic twist, 'some of the documents talked about how to recruit airport screeners and several of them even covered data security practices,' Klein said. 'Here were these contracts being awarded based on their ability to keep the data safe.'"
Yet another example of some bonehead "disposing" of old equipment without wiping the data first. Time to start cranking out those Pulitzer prizes. ;)
They should lose their contracts for failing to wipe the data off the hard drives.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I disassemble it, remove the platters, mount each one in a vise and bend it by striking it with a hammer.
If they can get data off that platter, they're welcome to it.
some of the documents talked about how to recruit airport screeners
It contained a link to monster.com?
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
It's a long standing complaint that governments keep information about contracts secret for the benefit of the contractors. Now you're complaining that a contractor didn't keep information about their contracts adequately secured? Are you stupid or something? The US taxpayers have a right to know the details of these contracts.. but they are denied that by commercial confidentiality concerns. If you want to cry a river for someone, think about the shareholders, but don't go blathering on about "secret government contracts" because they simply shouldn't exist.
How we know is more important than what we know.
$40 for a used hard drive of unknown provenance seems pretty high, unless you are talking about a considerably cooler than ordinary drive. Methinks that those journalists were haggling about as effectively as someone with an expense account for the story might be expected to.
Did you even read the article? It doesn't appear that the employee was at fault. The computer was "disposed of" by some outside company. Allegedly, they are responsible for sanitizing the hardware prior to binning it or parting it out.
I would expect, however, that this "outside firm" is wondering if they still have their contract with Northrop Grumman. I suspect not.
NG said it went through an outside firm, that doesn't mean it did. Not only that but this could have been from a personal computer.
Northrop Grumman is a business. Their employees don't take an oath to support (or defend) the constitution. It's all about the money.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Those "locks" do nothing to protect the data, and the drive still spins up when power is applied. You can even retrieve the password if you know what you're doing. Full drive encryption is a much better solution.
They make nice targets. Even the NSA would be hard-pressed to get data off of platters with bullet holes in them. I have seen this done with a high-velocity 7mm bolt-action rifle. VERY effective. Auditor asks how we ensure that hard drives are erased when they are taken out of service. Of course we erase them before using our "special process". Showed them a few samples, bullet holes and all. No more questions about hard drive erasure.
Yes, it's called a linux bootable cd. It turns out it's quite cheap as well.
While destroying the HD physically is a solution, it prevents the drive being reused.
Destroying the drive physically has a benefit beyond the obvious that the data is rendered unrecoverable. The more critical benefit is that if you have two crates of disk drives to destroy, you can look at them and know that the crate full of smashed drives is the "done" crate. That's especially important when you have an unskilled labor pool doing the work. You post a guy at the door with a clipboard ensuring only smashed drives are allowed to leave the building. It doesn't take a computer scientist to do that job correctly.
Wiping the drive and selling it has much less benefit than you might think. The value of the used drive is tiny -- especially since you still have to pay someone to track it through the wiping process, and you have to pay someone to wipe it. When you finally sell it, you might make a dollar or two at most.
Compared to the cost of the risk of losing data, it's a false economy to think that salvaging drives is a smart choice. Just the legal costs Northrup Grumman is about to go through over this one far exceeds the amount of money they have now or ever will make selling used drives.
John
The only secure information is never written down or told to other people.
not that this does'nt happen, i just find the story unlikely , reporters go to a random market in a random country and find this disk. more likely they had the disk beforehand and just made up the market bit.
DBAN http://dban.sourceforge.net/
It doesn't matter whether N-G handled it in-house or subcontracted the task. It was their responsibility to make sure the data was kept private or properly destroyed. If it was handled by a subcontractor, there should have been oversight provisions in place. While a subcontractor may have made the ultimate error, it does not clear N-G of its responsibility.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I'd say an Oath is a Moral "contract" and a Contract is a Legal "contract". God is not part of any oath i've ever taken. The US Constitution is the highest authority in the country.
It's nice to talk to a contractor that has had good experiences working inside the government. I'm being very honest, it's good to hear a gov employee say they take their job very seriously.
I have mostly dealt with KBR and NG which left a bad taste in my mouth. The worst cases being the $7,000 per month (rent) canvas tents my platoon lived in and a $100K generator that wouldn't run more than 10 hrs without someone babysitting it. The true reasons the Iraq war has cost us so much money.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." -V.I. Lenin
Let's prove him wrong, eh?
--
Toro
Instead of using illegal wiretaps, the NSA should just buy every drive that is sold on eBay. Just think of the information they could mine out of them!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Nonsense, placing platters into other drive enclosures to aid in data recovery is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It may not be perfect but it'll certainly work well enough.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)