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The Homemade Hard Disk Destroyer
Barence writes "All businesses have sensitive data they need to destroy when they replace PCs, but disposing of hard disks properly can be an expensive business. This has led one IT manager in the UK to come up with his own, homemade solution — Bustadrive. It uses a powerful 'hydraulic punch' to physically deform a hard disk, rendering it virtually unreadable, and requires nothing more than a pull of the lever on the front — similar to a drinks-can crusher. PC Pro tested the Bustadrive, and also sought the opinions of data destruction companies as to whether the device was really as effective as hoped, or just a fun way to mangle a hard disk or two."
Why not just use a degausser? or DBAN?
I just use a stand drill. I goes through all the platters and the circuitboard.
Fairly easy to find and purchase.
I gave up with the idea of an useful sig...
Just give the hard drive to your kid with a hammer, tell them to go nuts, come back 10 mins later with a dustpan and brush and you are sorted.
Sounds like you could fix it with... Pops-a-dent!
Jokes aside, from the FA: "The Bustadrive, then, looks like itâ€(TM)ll thwart all but the wealthiest and most determined of hard disk hackers"
So what they're saying is, this doesn't do the job as well as something like one of those DOD disc scraper/shredder things, but it is more fun, which I guess makes it news worthy?
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
My drill press makes for a very effective drive killer.
Use what you got!
pending committee review
I have always preferred putting some 7.62mm holes through old hard drives at a distance of 50 to 100m. Just remove the electronics so you don't end up with circuit board debris all over and old hard drives make great targets.
Time to offend someone
Nuke your old hard drive from the orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
I think it would be easy to melt the disk into a nice puddle of slag, what might be harder is not burning the building down in the process.
Raise the drive to the curie point. All magnetic domains are destroyed, and recovery is impossible with currently known methods.
I bet it takes less time to plug the machine in and boot off a CD than it does to open the case, remove the drive, and then smash it.
Not if you actually let the software RUN, it doesn't. Using DBAN on a 500 GB drive can take days, whereas this solution takes a few minutes at most. Your solution is only practical if you have one hard drive to destroy, and it is attached to a machine. The usual situation is the hard drive died and you replaced it with a good one, now need to make sure the dead one is REALLY dead before you toss it. Or, you have a batch of them that need to go because you're refreshing PCs.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Wipe the drive with software. Do it several times with different programs if you're paranoid. Set up an assembly line to do it if you have many, with each individual responsible for a separate step. Test drives prior to re-release.
People are so badly mistaken about how recoverable disk data is: they believe the same way they believe in Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. What a waste of good work.
A ball pean hammer applied vigorously to the drive spindle will render all but the most wealthy and determined effort to recover data fruitless and even then it is highly unlikely that all or even most of the data would be recoverable.
There is no need to physically destroy a drive to prevent data from being read. The claims of Gutmann that it was possible to read overwritten sectors were never sustained by his sources. I investigated this years ago and reported in Can Intelligence Agencies Read Overwritten Data that he was very much overwrought. I see he has gone on to tilt at other windmills since he propagated that myth.
This is not effective, I've successfully recovered drives where the PCB had been smashed, broken, etc. You just need to find the same model and replace with that.
Here is an easier method (version that may make from work).
There are commerical version that do alot better bending job, try http://www.garner-products.com/ for videos and pictures to gladden your hard drive destroying heart.
You don't need to melt the platters. You just need to get them hot enough to no longer be magnetic - that is above the Curie temperature for the alloy, which will be somewhere around 200C or so. When the magnetic domains reform there is none of them to be in the same place as they were before with the exception of a few edges on grain boundaries. Get even hotter and you'll change the grain size or even completely change the crystal structure and get grains in completely different places and sizes when it cools down.
That means heating the whole drive for long enough that the platters get hot and not just heating the outside of the thing the drive is in for a few minutes.
the topic is hard drive destruction, not sex.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If the thermite is on top of the drive, it won't just heat the outside; it will rapidly melt the outside then fall into the interior of the drive. Thats the point. Youtube abounds with vidoes of thermite burning down through car engines, and hard drive cases are a lot less substantial.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Over temperature might not correspond to data bit temperature for a very long time. If, for example, materials on the platter or elsewhere on the hard drive ablate they could keep it below the Curie temperature for quite a while. This is just speculation of course, I have no idea what hard-drive platters have on them - but I don't think its as simple as dialing an oven above the Curie temperature and then assuming the jobs done after X hours.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Which would be the better solution.
A small terracotta pot without a hole in the bottom of it + a small amount of thermite is the cheapest way, thermite is cheap and reasonably easy to make.
Ok, do that in your office and see how many minutes your job lasts once the fire's out.
Even if we did it outside at my place of work, we'd get complaints from the neighbors. A mechanical/hydraulic crusher/bender thing could be made into something that looks like an office appliance.
Nothing says "no data recovery" like a drive reduced to its elemental components.
Except it's not. Burning is generally a process of rapidly combining reactants, not dividing them up. Plus, it's rather environmentally unfriendly - having a cloud of smoke go up is frowned upon in most places these days.
Putting moderation advice in your
I agree...
There was an article on 2600 recently about ATA Security Specification. You can apparently use it to perform a secure wipe which is what the DoD uses these days. Two passes at different offsets (-10% and +10%) to prevent recovery of magnetic data from the 'edges' of the sectors with a scanning electron microscope or something crazy like that. Rather than the crazy 36-pass wipe or something they used back in the day.
If it's good enough for the government spooks, its a good place to start for us.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
My university group manages about 500 systems, mostly various flavors of solaris & linux with a few other unixes tossed in. First off, trying to encrypt all the disks in all of those systems (some of which are HUGE) would be a massive undertaking. Then there's the issue of trying to find an encryption system that's compatible across all these systems, the additional overhead needed to do the encryption/decryption, and the process of storing the encryption keys for all these systems. It's simply not worth the effort in large environments like this.
Rule 37: There is no 'overkill'. There is only 'open fire' and 'time to reload'.
A lot lower for alloys so it really depends on what it is. If we assume it's pure iron and a decades old drive then you are correct but small traces of other alloying elements have a dramatic effect (eg. for most stainless steel it's below room temperature in the extreme example).
There's a discussion at http://www.ocforums.com/archive/index.php/t-454159.html of a few different magnetic materials used in drives and Curie points with a few links to where they got the source data from.
Let me pull a bugtraq posting from 2005 out for perusal. There are other interesting tidbits in that thread too.
http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2005/Jul/0464.html
===
From: dave kleiman
Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2005 15:30:30 -0400
Here is a quote directly from Peter I received Saturday, he asked to have it
passed on to the list.
-Snip-
>I'd love to hear some thoughts on this from security and data experts
>out there.
People should note the epilogue to the paper:
Epilogue
In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the
35-
pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo
incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis
of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the
voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no more effect
than
a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact performing the full 35-pass
overwrite is pointless for any drive since it targets a blend of scenarios
involving all types of (normally-used) encoding technology, which covers
everything back to 30+-year-old MFM methods (if you don't understand that
statement, re-read the paper). If you're using a drive which uses
encoding
technology X, you only need to perform the passes specific to X, and you
never need to perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a
few
passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do. As the paper says, "A
good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected".
This was true in 1996, and is still true now.
Looking at this from the other point of view, with the ever-increasing
data
density on disk platters and a corresponding reduction in feature size and
use of exotic techniques to record data on the medium, it's unlikely that
anything can be recovered from any recent drive except perhaps one or two
levels via basic error-cancelling techniques. In particular the the
drives
in use at the time that this paper was originally written have mostly
fallen
out of use, so the methods that applied specifically to the older, lower-
density technology don't apply any more. Conversely, with modern high-
density drives, even if you've got 10KB of sensitive data on a drive and
can't erase it with 100% certainty, the chances of an adversary being able
to find the erased traces of that 10KB in 80GB of other erased traces are
close to zero.
Peter.
===
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Mail it to yourself via registered mail and then refuse deliver. Once it enters the Post Office loop, it'll never be seen again.
Ok, do that in your office and see how many minutes your job lasts once the fire's out
charred corpses don't terminate jobs
Plus, it's rather environmentally unfriendly
data processing including the manufacture and operation of hard drives is already environmentally unfriendly, and oxidizing metals is one way to get them back toward the more natural state for this world
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Reduce - Buy the biggest disks you can afford, they're worth repurposing and you won't have to spend as much on successors or the attendant labor.
Reuse - Repurpose disks for other purposes. Use last years' disks as part of your backup solution. Secure-format them on a low-power machine and put them on eBay.
Recycle - There must be SOMEONE willing to break the drives down and give you back the platters for destruction. There's significant aluminum in some of those drives.
All this crushing, drilling, and shooting of drives is fun. But it's also extremely wasteful. I understand destroying the drives if lives are at stake, but otherwise, stop.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Seriously, everyone comes up with these elaborate schemes to physically destroy disks, as a means of destroying data. Let's say this one MORE time: Can your method provide with a consistent, known, and guaranteed level of data destruction?
Consider the terms I used here.
1) Consistent: Is this going to be the same for every drive?
2) Known: How much effort in terms of hours and dollars is required to recover some or all of the data?
3) Guaranteed: Oh, really? Prove it to me!
With a software wipe, you can calculate (and measure) residual magnetism, and also account for 'hidden' areas on the disk (recovery sectors, etc.) With a hardware destruction method, what can you guarantee me?
In fact, the gushing article from PCPro even shows the weaknesses of this method:
"The Bustadrive, then, looks like it'll thwart all but the wealthiest and most determined of hard disk hackers"
Whereas, to the best of anyone's (public) knowledge, a single random overwrite will wipe data beyond any hope of recovery. A pass with DBAN will wipe it completely out, and if you pay for EBAN support, you can even get a certificate guaranteeing the data destruction.
Why are people so determined to destroy disks, rather than data? Even worse, people are eager to PAY for questionable disk destruction methods, rather than just simply destroy the data--what they want gone in the first place.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I do work at a DOE site..
The current method is now an industrial shredder.. Nothing left bigger than a dime..
This goes for Hard Drives, Flash drives, cell phones.. Anything that can store data never goes out. till it's been through the shredder.
See one in action
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair