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If you want to get rid of a harddrive with sensitive data I would first suggest that one gets familiar with the thought of not being able to sell it as used. P
by tscs37 9y ago
If you want to get rid of a harddrive with sensitive data I would first suggest that one gets familiar with the thought of not being able to sell it as used.
Personally for my drives, I use Boot and Nuke to erase the drive three times, first with zeroes, then with random data, then with zeroes again. After that I disassemble the drive, put a strong magnet over each platter, shredder the drive into almost powder, burn the pieces in a fire and then throw away the leftovers. Probably overkill but I want to be certain.
- readams 9y agoNormally you'd want to throw the remains into a volcano but I guess if you feel safe just throwing it away then you do you.
- qubex 9y agoHe forgot to mention he has purchased a steel foundry for the triennial purpose of zeroed-out drive disposal.
- Spooky23 9y agoYou jest, but jackass security people would probably be dissatisfied that your PII might be accessible to some alien race when after the earth explodes in 5 billion years and some remanent of data is somehow recoverable from an asteroid made of cooled lava. I recall one datacenter consolidation project where the hard drives from decommissioned servers were zapped with a degaussing device, shredded, and then somebody signed off that they were dumped in a furnace somewhere. (At some ridiculous expense) Meanwhile, the normal operation bins of drives that were in little blue bins for collection where just picked up and moved by the moving men, and are probably still in some closet in the new facility!
- ben-schaaf 9y agoThere's a great defcon talk exploring different methods to completely destroy a drive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y.
- PuffinBlue 9y agoI failed an audit once because the inspection team managed to recover data from the information encoded on the event horizon of a nearby black hole. Can't be too careful nowadays.
- QAPereo 9y agoAnother good worker screwed by the holographic principle. Edit: wow... that joke went badly.
- visarga 9y agoIn India we use elephants for 100% certainty.
- Agathos 9y agoNot a good idea. Elephants never forget.
- maxxxxx 9y agoDon't forget to check that the volcano is active!
- js2 9y agoOr nuke the entire site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure.
- QAPereo 9y agoYou throw away the leftovers instead of vitrification and firing the mass into space? /s
- qubex 9y agoA tokamak or a stellerator are also fit for purpose. The advantage is that the toridial magnetic fields that contain the fusion plasma also give the surviving bits another good hammering before vaporisation.
- QAPereo 9y agoThat’s good thinking, but only until we find the nearest black hole!
- zaptheimpaler 9y agoAll that effort just to get rid of some hentai...
- zaarn 9y agoAtleast it won't resurface as incriminating material 10 years down the line or something.
- keithpeter 9y agoHow about whole disk encryption? When it is time to move on, one simply forgets the passphrase and reformats the drive. Seriously: that is what I'm doing with ssd drives. Anyone know of any issues?
- akvadrako 9y agoWell your password could be brute-forced unless it's really long and random (about 20 chars). There might also be flaws in the encryption code. And changing it later won't work, because old sectors might still be recoverable, even if they are overwritten.
- keithpeter 9y agoI take the point, and my passphrase is a phrase so perhaps subject to dictionary attack of a sophisticated nature. At the end of the day, this is all about the level of risk one expects. Mine is 'don't want some random petty thief finding my credit card number' rather than 'don't want some government agency reading my old emails'.
- derefr 9y agoUsually with full-disk encryption, your supplied encryption passphrase is used to encrypt a single sector (or redundant set of sectors, spread across the disk) containing a much larger master key, which is in turn used to encrypt the rest of the sectors. When you change the disk password at the OS level, the master key remains the same (which is why you don't have to wait for the disk itself to re-encrypt); the single sector containing the key is just re-written to be encrypted with your new password. Later, when you actually reformat the drive, you (or your OS) should spend some extra time writing over the sector(s) containing your encrypted FDE master key. But only those sector(s) need to be securely wiped. Even if someone can brute-force the password you used, they won't have that sector to use to turn it into a decryption key for the sectors; and they definitely won't be able to brute-force the FDE master key itself. And, to make matters better, in systems with a TPM (most, these days), the TPM holds the FDE master key, and does the job of "shredding" it when it's no longer needed itself, as an async job kicked off by the OS along with the reformat. Also, in such systems, the FDE master key is never loaded into RAM, because the TPM itself does the sector-wise encryption/decryption as a DMA process.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoA friend of mine who was a military secure comms guy back in the 80s told me that if their position was about to be overrun the procedure was: 1) Fire a twelve gauge shotgun slug into the drive (these would have been external drives). 2) Place a thermite grenade on drive, pull pin. 3) Bug out.
- tscs37 9y agoI wouldn't bet on that being a 100% deletion. It'll probably trash most of the data but not all. Thermite grenades aren't very good at melting a huge chunk of metal either, sure it'll go straight through a machine block but it won't melt the entire machine block. To destroy all data on a harddrive all parts of the platter must be destroyed and heated to their Curie point.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoA hard drive has orders of magnitude less mass than an engine block. There's going to be nothing left of a drive but a puddle of molten metal after it's had a thermite grenade burn on it.
- tscs37 9y agoIf you check research related to this and the DEFCON talk where somebody actually put thermite into the drive, there won't be a puddle of molten metal. You can put thermite on it once you burned the parts if you want.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoThe DEFCON guy used 15 grams of thermite. An AN-M14 TH3 incendiary grenade contains ~750 grams of thermite (technically thermate). Those are two different things. Entirely.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago