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

Posted by Roblimo on from the it's-all-about-the-magnetism dept.

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.

3 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. Re:dd by Gordonjcp · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Exactly. A single pass of /dev/zero will wipe all the data on the drive beyond any hope of recovery, and sure as hell doesn't cost nine grand.

  2. This is not for us. by rodrigoandrade · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is a company that leeches off government contractors (Lockheed et al.) that have virtually infinite budgets paid by our tax dollars.

    Thus, $9000 for a low-level wipe.

  3. Re:dd by sexconker · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    Won't work on an SSD. You have no idea what the controller is doing behind the scenes. There is capacity on the SSD that is completely and utterly inaccessible to the host. When you write 256 GB of zeros to your 256 GB SSD, you've probably got 16 or 32 GB the controller hasn't told you about, with data you know nothing about. You have to issue the ATA SECURE ERASE command, and even then you'll have no idea if the controller actually respected it and wiped everything.

    For SSDs there are two reliable options.

    1: Encrypt everything in software so the key nor a hash of it could never possibly be stored on the drive in unencrypted form.
    2: Physical destruction.