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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."
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
Yeah I was about to post the same question.
But given the over-explanation for degaussing maybe it's something as simple as burn-in on old CRT monitors that did status displays for weapons panels/nuclear reactors, etc; ?
Not to mention it appears they are still using voodoo like having to degauss drives instead of simply wiping them.
Nobody has yet to show they managed to get back even a single file from a modern drive after it has had a simple zero wipe yet all these "security sites" still hold onto old wive's tales that haven't been true since the days of the MFM drives! Protip: The reason you could recover files from those old drives? The motors were VERY inaccurate and could slip the tracks, thus leaving tracks after an erase cycle. A modern drive have tracks sooo small there is no way in hell its gonna be missing tracks, you'd know there were issues because the drive would fail before it would miss a track.
So I wonder how long voodoo from the age of DOS is gonna be taken as fact? An encrypted drive with a single wipe would insure there was zero data to recover and wouldn't be based on 30+ year old info, it would also deal with the real issue, the fact that there is no way to securely wipe an SSD that I know of, because SSDs don't "erase", just mark sectors as available to minimize writes.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.