Nowadays, it's not enough to wipe the machine. You have to toss (or, at least, re-image) the hardware. Modern servers have firmware running on internal devices

Nowadays, it's not enough to wipe the machine. You have to toss (or, at least, re-image) the hardware. Modern servers have firmware running on internal devices, including Linux runnning on full ARM cores, that can be 1) imaged from the base OS, and 2) have full control over hardware or other important data. This includes: - IPMI Modules: http://fish2.com/ipmi/itrain.html http://fish2.com/ipmi/itrain.html - HDD Controllers (in your HDD/SSD drives): http://www.arm.com/markets/enterprise/hdd-ssd.php http://www.arm.com/markets/enterprise/hdd-ssd.php ... as well as ethernet controllers, any devices with PCI option ROMs (they can control boot), and quite a few other things. This essentially means that you have a bunch of fixed, poorly documented, runtime reconfigurable and re-imageable hardware, with full access to data and system resources.