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Where Old Hard Disks (with Digital Secrets) Go To Die
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Justin George writes at McClatchy that in a 20,000-square-foot warehouse, where visitors are required to trade in a driver's license for a visitor's badge, some of the nation's secrets are torn apart, reduced to sand or demagnetized until they are forever silent. Need to destroy a rugged Toughbook laptop that might have been used in war? E-End will use a high-powered magnetic process known as degaussing to erase its hard drive of any memory. A computer monitor that might have some top-secret images left on it? Crushed and ground into recyclable glass. Laser sights for weapons? Torn into tiny shards of metal. "We make things go away," says Arleen Chafitz, owner and CEO of e-End Secure Data Sanitization and Electronics Recycling, a company with sixteen employees that destroys hard drives, computers, monitors, phones and other sensitive equipment that governments and corporations don't want in the wrong hands. Chafitz say the information technology departments at typical companies might not have the proper tools or training to adequately dispose of data. IT departments focus on fixing and restoring data, they say, while data-wiping companies focus on just the opposite."
Using encryption not only saves you effort when the harddisk dies after years, it also provides security benefits during the drives lifetime and makes warranty-exchanges of young defect drives painless.
Silicone Heaven, otherwise where do all the calculators go?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Data destruction industry has finally "jumped the shark" with the posting of the Guardian Newspaper's hard drive destruction just a few hours ago. This sales pitch shows the billion dollar industry behind selling insurance to people afraid of digital losses via old hardware. http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Identity theft and trade secret losses are real, very real risks. But physically destroying hardware is to data protections as toilet paper on the loo lid is to AIDS prevention. The real threats are phishing (getting employees to log in credentials on fake websites), and loss of active PCs (theft of laptops from the back of cars), and the new credit-card swiping devices used at Target stores are the actual risks.
I have heard the argument that physically destroying the disks eliminates the potential for bad apple employees to skirt the wiping of disks, and that with physical destruction you really control human error. I say bullhockey. When I have a staffer wiping disks, I can inventory the disks and randomly sample them to see if the data has been erased, and replace the staffer if necessary. If the drives are thrown in a mechanical shredder, how do I know a PARTICULAR drive was thrown in the shredder? How will I ever catch the bad apple? Try sifting through the scrap fluff for serial numbers to make sure the right one went through the machine.
The big opportunity is "digital haystacks", putting randomized and false data out, especially metadata. If enough bad data written on to drives, it has the added benefit of wasting the time of Russian hackers who have too much of it on their hands.
Gently reply
This is /. brother, I'm sure everyone here knows what the hell a degaussing gun does without the description there.
Due explain how other than burn in a computer monitor may still contain top secret images though.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1
Just scanning the title of TFS I thought this was going to be an article about GCHQ technicians, angle grinders, and electric drills.
Degaussing? On a modern hard disk, with that level of coercivity? Bloody amateurs. Degaussing won't do shit to a modern hard disk.
A dd zerofill pass is actually enough to stop the NSA and GCHQ in a determined 'recovery' attack, for any sector that's actually overwritten, to their immense frustration. Meanwhile, remapped sectors and removing HPAs are the domain of ATA Secure Erase - Enhanced, and all the firmware seems to do just what it says on the tin for that. One pass of each would be just fine.
Bets are only off if the drive firmware's implanted (in which case, they probably already exfiltrated the data while it was running, anyway). If you suspect that, kill it with fire: you need to raise the platter above the Curie point. This means heat. That actually destroys the data. You could destroy the drive in any reasonable form by shredding it, but there's little point in that - see above - you could just erase it.
If it's not being reused then degaussing is a waste of time and money if an oxy torch or plasma cutter is available. Even cheaper would be the sort of rollers used to make steel rod from billets. I'm sure any junkyard on the planet would have even better suggestions for total destruction. You can't recover data from tiny fragments, especially if they've been heated up to less than red heat to lose their magnetism for a while and come back to room temperature with the magnetic domains in different places.
It is rude to randomly redirect visitors to beta.slashdot.
Even more so because beta sucks.
Providing a hard to find opt-out, adding /?nobeta=1 to the url, just upgrades the aggravation level from "rude" to "insulting and infuriating".
The only acceptable option is, as always, opt-in.
I guess you need reminding. a lot.
so when you want to take a storage device into rough environment would you take spinning media...
so the question would be what do they do to SSD...
John Jones
What kind of secrets does a laser sight have? It's just a glorified laser pointer.
Anybody having e Greasemonkey script to filter out these awful Pickens ads?
My town has a huge incinerator for common trash that will bring any computer component well over 1000C: most computer component would be finely destroyed to atomic level. As a bonus the incinerator produces electricity.
It would suffice to secure the transport to the incinerator and let heat finish the task.
EPC does the same thing. Though they don't degauss the drive. They completely destroy it. I am fortunate to have one of their recycling centers in town and believe me there is nothing like watching your hard drives go up a 30 foot conveyor belt into a 30 foot tall shredder and come out as slivers.
I don't work for them, I'm just damn happy they exist. Capitalism at its best, find a need and fill it.
Guess I need to find a new General Practitioner! >:(
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
If you make a couple of holes with a 1/4" titanium bit, is there anything salvageable? Or is this service really marketed for the paranoids?
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
A lot of us firearm enthusiasts would love to buy used some of those military gun sights. I cant afford a $7800 laser sight, so they just destroy it to protect the manufacturer's high price point. It's why we dumped tens of thousands of Jeeps into the ocean instead of allowing Americans to buy them surplus, it would drive down the price of new cars and we cant have rich people making less money.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Have some fun with hard drives. AR-15 practice targets.
Conservative, mod down for violating
(posting as AC because) as someone who used to supervise drive destruction at a rather touchy agency... we used plasma furnaces. Would could still recover the odd bits from shredding.
Remember. Read. Think.
If they're not stupid, they're checking to see if the drives don't have any crypto-coin wallets before destroying them.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
That's what I do when a drive fails or becomes noisy. I keep some of the magnets, remove the board, heads and platters, remove the copper coil from the head assembly. When I have around 10 or 20 drives (5 to 10 pounds), I sell them to the scrap yard. Good luck retrieving data after everything has been tossed in the big aluminum bin. Not a big amount at 50 cents a pound though.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
One nice thing about working for the DOD is that Dell doesn't expect you to be able to return your old hard drive. Just say that your hard drive is defective and they will send you a new one no questions asked. Of course most of the people I know (myself included) were to honest and would only ask for a new HD if their old one was in fact defective. But I suppose if you were into using your power for evil and not good you could have gotten an entire collection of new HD's that way. You also could have been guilty of stealing government property if you used them for anything but work (which wouldn't be likely since they aren't barcoded but you never know) so I guess that is also why nobody bothered with that. HD are cheap enough that it isn't worth it.
But hawking says the info is still there, now.
In Sears, you can get long Craftsman metal shears. These are a little longer than normal ones. The blade is long enough to bite into a disc platter. So what I do is disassemble the disk (Craftsman has star wrenches, too, and you need good ones because machine-screwed star screws are hard to get out without stripping your screwdriver), remove the platters, and cut them apart with the long metal shears. Won't work in bulk, but works for me.
Just dump them in a storage water pool for five or six years.
Oh- - I recently got an enclosure and am going through my old IDE drives.
The oldest so far is 8gig from 1999/2000. All work perfectly.
It was ironic that I had trouble tossing it in the trash even i had an 8gig memory stick I bought that day for $4.99 at Fry's. LOL!
The 80GB drive is more interesting. keep or toss.
These things are good forever if you dont' spin them apparently.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
All those secret orders. Assume you were Siemens or another leading company. Wanna bet your e-trash is not diverted. Sure?
Due to revelations and grave constitutional disrespect - behaviours need to change - and outsourcing and cloud are not solutions.
Pay someone else because your staff are too dishonest and may ebay them, or unskilled in using a hammer?
A pottery kilin will liquify metal Use a grinder to reduce PCB's to granules. Take the platters out and sandblast them clean. Think real carefully - it is reported agencies have thier own HDD firmware - and why is that? Short the device power pins for good measure.or solder in a strip of magesium ribbon.
Thermite, HCL baths, and pumping a drive with acetelyne and glow plugging it is fun too.Forget degaussing - seen mag tapes jump through 5mm aluminium sheilds and neary kill employees. Salt your old drives and have some dummies lying about.
The deal-breaker in every single data-destruction company I've looked into, is that they don't allow regular joe-six-pack to physically hold the asset from start to finish. At some point they all say "Now we go behind this closed door with your drive and or documents, staff only. But *trust* us, we will destroy it."
Complete deal-breaker.
You can’t hide secrets from the future with math.
You can try, but I bet that in the future they laugh
at the half-assed schemes and algorithms amassed
to enforce cryptographs in the past.
Odd that the number of employees is mentioned, to me anyway. What would happen if even one of those 16 was disgruntled, or whatever Snowden was? If the 20,000 sq. ft. warehouse, not that big at all, is just as secure as the NSA office where he worked, then another leak seems imminent.
Seems a waste to destroy components when they might be reused after wiping.
660.32C melts aluminium, this temperature is fairly easily attainable in a domestic furnace (eg a garden incinerator or wood stove, a blacksmith's forge if you're of such a mind as to have one of these). OK, just doing a melt-n-pour into ingots leaves you with a variable-purity alloy containing 99.9 aluminium, the rest a mix of palladium, platinum and chromium, but that's still useful (and being ready melted in your own furnace guarantees you the data is gone forever, and you have full chain of custody of the data until it dies). That said it is more expensive to recycle aluminium than it is to refine it from bauxite (tho if it's there, right?), reflected in the abysmal value of scrap aluminium and even considering the fact that following a major bauxite find in Western Australia in the middle of last year the arse fell right out of the scrap aluminium market.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Oh for mod points for the Frontalot ref.