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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.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024 &
No, no, no. When it absolutely has to be destroyed, you use thermite.
"Let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average." - A. W. Tozer
I find a bath in NaOH to be a very effective way to destroy media past any possible recovery. Specially if you are going to incinerate it afterwards.
NaOH is also very cheap, and available everywhere, making it a wonderful low budget solution to use in the less cosmopolitan parts of the world.
morcego
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.
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.
Our former sysadmin purchased a drill press for the purpose of rendering old hard drives unrecoverable. Seemed both fun and practical.
Just hand it over to any teenager - they usually destroy most things that comes anywhere near them.
To guarantee swift and total destruction make sure to tell them to *please* be careful with it.
And that it is fragile and expensive.
I worked in a legal firm which specialized in e-discovery and forensics, they weren't data-recovery specialists, but they were able to pull data from slack space and previously rewritten areas. But that is besides the point. For client-privacy reasons, legal reasons, and corporate policy, they ended up with hundreds of hard drives per month that needed to be destroyed with no possible way to recover the data. A $24 sledgehammer is certainly a cheap and fun sounding answer. But after smashing five hard drives, this stops being fun, you're making a lot of noise, and someone would need to clean up the mess. I'm sure OSHA wouldn't approve of that either. We were in a corporate office in the middle of New York City, so smart-ass solutions like thermite; sodium hydroxide; shooting them with a .45, a shotgun, or a bazooka aren't going to fly. Because of chain of custody, you couldn't even take the hard disks into an empty field to do this.
The guy responsible for destruction started unscrewing everything, taking out the platters, then punching a hole in the platters with a screw-press. But like the sledgehammer solution, this was slow labor-intensive. I believe they ended up using a qualified HD destruction service, who would come to your office once a month, and give you metal confetti back. This of course isn't cheap. Eventually, purchasing one of these Garner devices would make economic sense.
My point is, sure, given our own devices, we can think of quick and fun ways to destroy a hard disk. But when you are limited by government and corporate rules, companies like Garner aren't just greedy, but filling a real need.
Back in the 80s I ran a computer center that handled classified data, and we used DEC RM05 removable-disk-pack drives on a VAX. The AR380-380 regs for declassifying storage media gave us a few choices
- Degaussing with NSA-certified Big Magnets (not in MY computer lab, where I still have disks I want to keep!) - NSA-certified software. The big deal isn't just overwriting it 3-7 times to prevent the KGB from using electron microscopes on it, it's making sure that you've really erased all the data, including the spare and bad blocks remapped by the disk controllers, and if you only had one disk drive in the machine, the software needed to be able to keep running from RAM even after you'd erased the operating system including the files for your disk-wiping commands. (Too much paperwork required.) - Physical destruction. Why, yes, we're a large company with a machine shop down in the basement, and they have Sandblasters! Win!I was no longer sysadmin by the time they closed the classified processing system. My successor got to disassemble the dozen or so disk packs we had and take them down to the machine shop for sandblasting.
Remember how ever sysadmin in the 80s used to have a disk on their wall with decorative scratches on it from a head crash? Hers was pure shiny metal.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks