When Your Data Absolutely, Positively has to be Destroyed (Video)

Here's a corporate motto for you: "Destroying data since 1959." Timothy ran into a company called Garner Products (which doesn't use that motto as far as we know), at a security conference. While most exhibitors were busily preserving or encrypting data one way or another, Garner was not only destroying data but delighting in it. And yes, they've really been doing this since 1959; they started out degaussing broadcast cartridges so broadcasters could re-use them without worrying about old cue tones creeping into new recordings. Now, you might ask, "Instead of spending $9,000 or more to render hard drives useless, couldn't you just use a $24 sledge hammer? And have the fun of destroying something physical as a free bonus?" Yes, you could. You'd get healthy exercise as well, and if you only wanted to destroy the data on the hard drives, so what? New drives are cheap these days. But some government agencies and financial institutions require degaussing before the physical destruction (and Garner has machines that do physical destruction, too -- which is how they deal with SSDs). Garner Products President Ron Stofan says in the interview that their destruction process is more certain than shooting a hard drive with a .45. But neither he nor Tim demonstrated a shooting vs. degaussing test for us, so we remain skeptical.

Comments

dd

[Anonymous Coward]

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024 &

Re:dd

[SpectreBlofeld]

I encourage anyone who has 20 minutes to spare to watch this short Frontline documentary on E-waste:

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/ghana804/video/video_index.html

I bet lots of companies throwing out old hardware who are worried about data leakage could actually find use for their old drives in-house. Hell, just keep them in a closet somewhere until one of your in-use drives go bad (and they will).

Re:dd

[omnichad]

With the platter density, a 5400 RPM 500GB single platter drive gets much better throughput.

Re:dd

[dave562]

A format is not the same as an overwrite. Even a low level format is not the same as zeroing.

Re:dd

[Insightfill]

As a bonus, a really enterprising sysadmin will use the (aggregate) empty desktop disk space as a de-centralized near-term backup solution. Mind you, it should never replace tapes, snapshots, etc, but...

If you can park encrypted copies of critical data around redundantly on every desktop, deny the use of that space to the desktop user, and do it in a way that's automated? Sweet.

Many years ago, a company named "Mangosoft" had a product named "Medley" which would do this.. Each user would allocate a certain amount of their disk drive to the "Medley" drive, and all of the users (up to 25 max) would share a really big drive together. Earlier versions of this technology worked by basically keeping two copies of every file, and moving a copy to the local drive of the last user who accessed it. If a machine holding a file went down (power, etc.) then the list of files it held would be pushed around from other working machines to always ensure duplicates are still around.

Current versions of this would probably be GlusterFS, Coda and Tahoe.

COAL

[Charliemopps]

Coal is about $80/ton. Take about 1lb of that, light it, set a bunch of hard drives in the middle of it, put a house fan next to it... hard drives are a puddle of molten steel/plastic in about 10min and it cost you pennies. You can do the same with propane, but you'll need to build a burner and such.

And before anyone gets on their high horse about burning coal, keep in mind the little device they're using her was most likely powered by coal generated electricity.