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Ask Slashdot: Datacenter HDD Wipe Policy?
New submitter socheres (1771002) writes I keep a Slackware server hosted at various datacenters on leased hardware for personal / freelance business use. I have been doing this for the last 10 years and during this time I moved my stuff to several datacenters, some small and some big name companies. No matter the hosting company, since I choose to install my own OS and not take a pre-installed machine, I always got the hardware delivered with the previous guys' data stored on the hard drives. It was also the case with spare drives, which were not installed new if I did not ask specifically for new ones. Has this happened to you? How often?
Seems like the policy is none
I've been in the IT infrastructure business for years, and have always relied on physical destruction (shredding) of hard drives when disposing of old systems.
I can see where that may not be cost effective with leased systems, but I would take your experience as a warning to clean up after yourself and secure-wipe hard drives when your lease is up and not count on the datacenter to do it for you.
IANAL, but I also wonder who owns the data on a leased hard drive when the lease is up? If you improve an apartment or build a building on leased land, those improvements typically become the property of the owner when the lease is up. I wonder if that has been addressed with data in the absence of relevant contractual language?
...financial services degauss then physically shred the drives. You get a nice certificate too. It's extreme but cheaper than a data leak.
Get an OS re-image then simply fill the hdds with random data. This works well on HDDs, but SSDs with their 10 or 20% wear space, perhaps not, they need pulling and disposing.
Thermite.
For security purposes, I use a WiebeTech drive eraser to scrub the drive (DoD Sanitize standard), then send them to a physical destruction service.
Paranoid? Yes. Expensive? Yes. Worth it to my employers? Yes.
"They told me it was impossible. I replied with maniacal laughter." http://www.mydailyrant.com/
What I have learned from the news is that the policy has always been "If there has been nothing in the news, don't bother." It costs electricity and labour cost to do it. The previous story on /.
https://www.google.com/search?...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Contract with them. They destroy everything.
Oh no they don't destroy everything. They have tax records going back for a decade or more from both what you, your employer, and financial institutions reported and trust me they can pull these records out of the hat when it suits their purpose. (Such as when they decide to audit you.)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I would never expect new drives on a leased box as it's a leased box. Nor would I expect them to sanitize my data before handing it to a new customer. I work with a lot of hosting companies and it's not very uniform. One dirt cheap place runs everything through dban before handing it back others not so much. If you need to insure this happens expect to pay for it.
No sir I dont like it.
I have seen this so often, this is something I consider is assumed.
First thing I do with any new machine is zero it out. SSDs... easy:
blkdiscard /dev/sdx; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=1024 count=1024; blkdiscard /dev/sdx
The reason I do a quick dd of the first part is to completely zero out the partition table. Some SSDs might have zapped all data, but it can't hurt to be safe and know that the partition table is ready to be initalized by a subsequent OS install.
HDDs, I use /dev/zero, /dev/urandom, then /dev/zero again, alternating this a couple times. This is less for destroying data than to ensure that no drive errors come up.
The main reason I erase a disk thoroughly before bringing it online, other than to check for disk errors, is so I don't have to deal with the previous owner's data and possible legal entanglements that may cause. Look how many years in prison a guy in Texas got because of Google's findings. It is easier to just zero out all incoming media to ensure that any data sitting on the drives is mine, and mine alone.
Of course, the real question of zeroing out drives is when the server is being decommissioned. This is why I try to encrypt all partitions. With BitLocker, the Windows format command is smart enough to thoroughly zero out the metadata and the areas on the volume that hold the master key, making recovery pretty much impossible. So, a simple format command, and the machine is decommissioned. However, I much prefer to overwrite the drives completely (most server RAID controllers have this functionality, or if they don't, just delete the existing drive volume, and make a RAID 2 volume on pairs, let it complete, then delete the volume and go back to a RAID 5, which will end up overwriting all drives with unrecoverable garbage.)
Of course, booting up a DBAN CD will also do the trick.
Of course, the best way is to pull all drives and physically destroy them, but that usually isn't doable in a lot of cases, so having a volume encryption layer does help.
Drill press. 'nuf said.
I was thinking that taking it apart followed by sanding off the oxide layer from the platters would be good enough, but if you have a drill press, to each their own.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Some things require Old Tech.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I've worked for companies that sell Refurb drives.
Oh how I wish you could tell us who you used to work for. Unfortunately, as soon as you do, /. is going to get a subpeona for your IP address, and your ISP will get a supeona for your personal information, and... well, it could get ugly.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
A drill press, while flashy, is simultaneously less secure, convenient, and available than a wipe, all while being more expensive.
Or what they are contracted to do. There is no use arguing with somebody who insists you spend 2 hours+ doing a D.O.D. wipe on a out of warranty drive if they are willing to pay you. Otherwise, 15s through a degausser will do the trick.
Something tells me you didn't make a copy of the last guy's data before you wiped it and installed your stuff. I'm betting no calls to the NSA,or even the local police were made. Nobody cares about this stuff except the people that need to. Finally, there is no machine in a datacenter that has both important data and Slackware on it. Hope you remove your own data before the next lease runs out, because nobody is going to do it for you.
Issuing the ATA Secure Erase command is the most professional way. The drive itself knows the most efficient way to nuke all data from the orbit. Especially useful for SSDs as it might also zero hidden wear leveled data and set all sectors into a TRIMmed state.
Contract with them. They destroy everything.
Oh no they don't destroy everything. They have tax records going back for a decade or more from both what you, your employer, and financial institutions reported and trust me they can pull these records out of the hat when it suits their purpose. (Such as when they decide to audit you.)
http://politics.slashdot.org/s...
If it's ceramic, wipe them three times with 1s and 0s and then smash them to bits with a large hammer, and then cast the resulting powder into a nice art sculpture.
If it's metal, do the same but melt it.
Have to agree - anything that went on the cloud should be assumed to have been copied.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Someone was pulling your leg unless you mean their internal bookkeeping and H.R. records or internal research projects. But for the typical drive in a Google search engine node, well, all of its data is available to the entire public via Google's own web page. which is kinda the point. There's no need to shred those drives
Explain please how a drill press is not secure.
Let's see...
1) flashy: not really
2) secure: definitely, no hard disk has ever been physically reconstructed that had holes in the platters. Short of a scanning electron microscope, you're not reconstructing that data
3) available: go to home depot
4) price: yes, more expensive than running dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/olddisk, but cheaper than an industrial-grade shredder and of course cheaper than any commercial "enterprise" data removing software. I think drill presses can be had for around $200.
The search-engine drive may contain stuff they'd rather not be public (for reasons of competition), like the software that manages all that data and the data structures it is stored in. Then there is Google Mail, which contains private emails and contacts. And I'm sure other examples.
Note the fine distinction made there.
One of the early comments alluded to this, but didn't quite take it far enough.
If userA leases a drive and fills it with illegal content (child pornography, Snowdon's files, whatever) and then leaves and the hosting company the re-leases the drive to userB without clearing out the drive properly, who gets arrested? Who should get arrested?
userA is long gone. Could potentially be tracked down. Need to prove they put the files there and not userB or hosting company.
userB has access (but potentially not ownership) of said files. This is still arrest-able offence.
Hosting company has ownership of files (possibly) in a leased environment??? If this is the case, should the hosting company be responsible not only for clearing the files from userA before putting userB in jeopardy from the law but also responsible for monitoring their drives for illegal activity and content.
Now we are on a slippery slope...
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
And, not nearly as fun as a FN-FAL or similar with milsurp ammo.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Something tells me you didn't make a copy of the last guy's data before you wiped it and installed your stuff. I'm betting no calls to the NSA,or even the local police were made
These days he might care.... never know when one might find a Bitcoin wallet carelessly left lying around complete with private keys.
If he didn't at least take a deep look at the data to see if there was anything there that he could "use", then it's because he's an honest person, perhaps. Not everyone is like that.
I work for a hosting company and we wipe all drives using DBAN when a server is canceled.
That's one approach.... another is simply delete and re-create the hardware RAID10 (or RAID5), re-initialize, and install the new tenant's operating system. The data has not been explicitly wiped, but the new leassee is not going to get anything meaningful out of it without physical access and a lot of trouble, anyways.
I got a cheap drill press from Harbor Freight for $56 on sale.
Dismantle, keep the magnets (the flat ones are really fun to play with, lots of projects) , and recycle the drive and platters (50 cents/pound), there's even a copper coil in there at 3$/pound
Not much, but once dismantled, data is gonna be pretty hard to recover.
If you really want it gone, Thermite...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Belt Sander
hold it long enough you dont even have to take it apart lol
secure: definitely, no hard disk has ever been physically reconstructed that had holes in the platters
Not correct, and its not even a little difficult. A contiguous multi-inch stripe of a modern HD platter contains gigs of data. The only challenge is going to be fragmentation, but with a single hole the file table is probably intact.
You're basically relying on the high cost and inconvenience-- the hole through the disk renders the existing casing + chipset inoperable, but does nothing to affect 99% of the actual data on the disk. An attacker with the right sort of enclosure could simply read the data right off of the platters, very little reconstruction necessary.
And while you you would be right to take any such self-interested claims with a grain of salt, its worth noting that several recovery companies (Kroll, Centrex) indicate that such recoveries are possible, and that a number of national regulations in both the US and the UK mandate very particular forms of physical destruction, notably where the entire surface of the drive is affected (shredding, grinding, degaussing).
But hey-- if you want to argue with the DoD, NIST, Kroll, and the UK Information Commissioner's Office, all so that you can use a messy and non-compliant form of destruction-- go for it. Have fun explaining to federal regulators why you felt it was best to ignore both the experts and federal law regarding private information.
Because it cant be automated, it creates a huge mess, cant be done in office space (unless you like cleaning up fine bits of aluminum, epoxy, and steel), and requires a decent drill.
When in doubt - C4
-- Jamie Hyneman
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Based on my empirical experience, I am fully confident that it is properly implemented in the firmware.
If I was a criminal, I'd buy used drives in bulk, and see if there was any data on them worth using (or ransom). Using a drive in a way that allowed plausible deniability would take some effort and technical knowledge ... Not the kine of thing that most thieves depend on.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
There is a lot more on those drives than simply one big folder called "Internets". It will most likely have keys, configurations, software, information about network structure, logs, and anything else you might be able to think of. It's rather weird to assume they don't have anything on there.
Take some personal responsibility. Pay your taxes like everyone else and that won't happen.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
The rule of thumb here is:
If the process you are expecting is not written into your agreement or documented as a matter of company policy, then the process is not done.
Likely you're not using a data center certified under HIPAA, PCI, SOX, SSAE/SAS-70, otherwise it would be documented and you'd already know.
Kriston
This technique works for data drives not boot drives: 100% full disk encryption. When you decommission the drive, decommission the encryption key. This technique also works with wear leveling SSD drives that might not always properly erase if you attempt to wipe the data.
This is a boring sig
Encryption or physical destruction. Failed media replaced under vendor's field service is destroyed. Most vendors will add a surcharge to their service agreements that allow failed media to remain on site for destruction rather be be RMA'd. If not, well then bill me.