"Smash Your Hard Drive" To Fight Identity Theft 527
Will Do This For Free writes "BBC News has a story about the only fireproof way of safeguarding your personal information when dumping your old computer: 'It sounds extreme, but the only way to be 100% safe is to smash your hard drive into smithereens. [...] The more thoroughly the better.'
This sounds like so much fun that I almost feel like doing it right now. Let me press Submit Story first."
I find a Magnet Works (Score:4, Informative)
I doubt anyone could recover data from it, as it is surely scrambled.
Or make it reusable... (Score:5, Informative)
and just use dBan, Derrick's Boot and Nuke. [dban.org]
Nothing beats an afternoon of watching dBan and a comfy chair. Beer or whisky optional.
Environmentally criminal! (Score:4, Informative)
This recommendation from Which? magazine has incensed me today. They're reported as saying "It sounds extreme, but the only way to be 100% safe is to smash your hard drive into smithereens." [bbc.co.uk]. There's no need to do this if you use disk wiping software, which is probably even better than a hammer; as the BBC article points out. Darik's Boot And Nuke [dban.org] is perfect for this. It's environmentally criminal to be suggesting the best way to wipe a disk is to smash it.
Pete Boyd
Re:Environmentally criminal! (Score:5, Informative)
Problem is that most people are way too stupid to understand how to use that, but they can understand smash.
The funny part, 90% of those people that understand smash, will not smash it enough. I have recovered data from laptop hard drives that looked pretty smashed, but 45 minutes in my improvised clean room moving the platters to a different drive and I was able to read the contents.
Some ideas for destruction (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to go the nuclear option, they demonstrated some favorites: mangling the platters in a vice, dremel or hand grinder, propane or cutting torch, melting it in thermite, etc.
A hospital I worked for once, when decommissioning old computers, would take the hard drive over to a drill press and put a couple holes through it. Nowadays I think they've bought a drive shredder.
Re:"The only fireproof way of safeguarding your da (Score:5, Informative)
The platters don't have to be melted, they only need to be heated to the Curie point [wikipedia.org] to loose all their information. Of course, that would still take a pretty hot fire.
Just wipe it once (Score:5, Informative)
Really, there's no need to wipe it more than once unless you honestly think it will matter. At least these guys think so:
http://16systems.com/zero [16systems.com]
Re:Environmentally criminal! (Score:5, Informative)
It's really not that hard to transfer platters. and yes use an identical drive.
a makeshift clean room is easy. run the shower in the bathroom for 15 minutes on the hottest setting and then shut it off and let the room cool down completely. the mist in the air will remove all dust as it falls to the ground. use a tyvek suit and cover your hair, face, hands and you're good to go.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I find a Magnet Works (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I find a Magnet Works (Score:2, Informative)
DOD Guidlines. Re:"The only fireproof (Score:5, Informative)
To properly dispose of hard drives which may contain Top secret information is a 5 step process to be performed in the order specified and by competent engineers.
1. Perform a triple overwrite security erase on the entire disk.
2. Use a bulk degausser (AKA a powerful electro magnet).
3. Crush the drive under a roller or tank tracks, whichever is more convenient.
4. Melt the scrap into slag.
5. Bury that Slag in a toxic waste dump to deter any attempts at data recovery.
That's not exactly how it went but I think this is pretty close. Can anyone find the original?
Re:In other news (Score:5, Informative)
Hard drives are cheap. If you have any data that you absolutely don't want to get out...EVER...physical destruction is the 100% solution.
And, in terms of practicality, running DoD-7 takes about 1000 times longer than whipping out the old Sledge-O-Matic. If you're retiring a few dozen computers, even that gets old, and you start looking for the thermite.
Re:In other news (Score:4, Informative)
Re:DOD Guidlines. Re:"The only fireproof (Score:5, Informative)
The real spec is DoD 5220.22-M, available at http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/html/522022m.htm [dtic.mil].
Re:"The only fireproof way of safeguarding your da (Score:3, Informative)
Heating a destroys the magnetic domain's long before it melts. As density increases the ability to do data recovery when things go bad keeps decreasing.
Re:"The only fireproof way of safeguarding your da (Score:4, Informative)
Whoosh!
The point was that they said this is a "fireproof" way of restoring your data - which is basically saying that throwing the hard drive into a fire would somehow recover the data.
Foolproof would have been a better word to use; as in "even a fool could protect their data using this method".
Re:No you don't. (Score:3, Informative)
Don't forget to harvest the handy magnets if you bother to do it that way.
Some hard disk platters are glass, so be careful!
Shoot It (Score:3, Informative)
Five shots from a .458 Winchester Magnum firing soft-points really wrecks a drive into smithereens. It's actually hard to find a spot on the platters that isn't either punched through or scratched to near-oblivion by tiny fragments bouncing around inside the thing. Really, they look almost sandblasted where not outright gone.
And it is a lot of fun, too.
DoD standard superceded by NIST's standard (Score:3, Informative)
There's no original because that's not the spec.
The real spec is DoD 5220.22-M, available at http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/html/522022m.htm [dtic.mil].
The DoD standard has been superceded by NIST Special Publication 800-88:
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-88/NISTSP800-88_rev1.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_remanence
Re:I find a Magnet Works (Score:2, Informative)
The 'previous value' of each bit is nonsense.
For one thing, hard drives do not store data like that. They store a one when the data changes, and a zero when it's the same. So 11010011 would actually be written as written as 10111010.
A quick thought will demonstrate that not knowing the value of any bit will render the entire rest of the byte unknown.
More importantly, bytes start without a value. They are in indeterminate state, they are magnetized. They are essentially .5. They are then formatted, at the factory, by writing a 'zero' to them.
Pretending that your idea worked (Which it doesn't.) every bit would read as a one. (Or, rather, every bit as a change bit, resulting in the data being 10101010.)
However, your idea is dumb to start with, because, as the other reply points out, hard drives aren't storing 0 or 1. They're storing 0.0-0.3 and 0.7-1.0, because hard drive manufactures make them as dense as possible, to the point that when writing one bit, you can't help but slightly alter the bit ahead or behind it. The development of hard drives is a contest to produce less overlap when writing.
Which means if you were to actually read the value of a bit, there would be a good chance it was 0.2 not because it 'used' to be a 1, which incidentally doesn't work that way, but because it has a 1 after it.
This is actually somewhat of a simplification, because in actuality, at the base level, hard drives are 'analog'. The strength of write is not a square wave, or even a jigsaw wave. It is much smoother than that. It is like transmitting morse code using a slide whistle.
I know there are lots of stupid urban myths about how hard drives work, but if there was a way to recover data from an overwritten hard drive, it would immediately get used to store more data on the drive.
The only way to recover data from a zero'd hard drive is to look for remapped sectors.
Re:In other news (Score:3, Informative)
The drive's firmware is what keeps track of where the "good" and "bad" sectors are on the drive. Presumably, if you took the platters out, and put them in a different drive, it would have no idea which were the good or bad sectors, and therefore WOULD let you read those sectors. No guarantees that what it reads was what was originally there, but I'd be surprised if it didn't let you read them.
Re:DOD Guidlines. Re:"The only fireproof (Score:2, Informative)
This is incorrect and has been for a long time.
See: http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/sec96/full_papers/gutmann/index.html
Re:Not cheap if computer is free (Score:3, Informative)
Yup, my work donates newer stuff to local school board but all they get is case/logic board/processor/powersupply. They pull ram/drives/video cards. Can also pick up older stuff at auction but it's sold by the pallet, usually for under $100.00. Got a load of old Mac stuff this way but had two nice G5's in there.