"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."
Just told my brother this (Score:4, Interesting)
His PC died due to dust accumulation (fried mobo, dead power supply, fused RAM) and he asked me what to do with his system. I told him the only thing he needed to worry about was his HD. Told him to drill a few holes in the drive, use a blowtorch in those holes if he still had one (he used to work in home remodeling), smash the drive with a hammer and put it in a bag with his used cat litter (they have two cats).
If someone is desperate enough to want the information on his drive, they're going to have to work for it.
Shredder (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"The only fireproof way of safeguarding your da (Score:5, Interesting)
Throwing into fire is not enough, the magnetic domain on the platter is still there for highly technical team to retrieve. You have to melt the hard disk into liquid and stir thoroughly.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Shredder (Score:1, Interesting)
I saw this at a recycling company near where I work, they are subcontracted to dispose of drives for a legal firm, each time apparently the legal firm sends a man with a camcorder to record it being done.
It's like a wood-chipper, but for metal... I'm glad I didn't hear the noise it must make...
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I find a Magnet Works (Score:3, Interesting)
Wrong. There were several airlines that suffered complaints that laptops were failing on their planes. The table/trays were magnetic so they could be folded and stowed away. Turns out if you sit a laptop on top of a magnet, [elliott.org] the hard drive soon fails.
Re:Whats the problem with... (Score:4, Interesting)
It is possible to reread some data from a zeroed (or oned (sp?)) disk. Pretty obscure, but I think it is to do with the threshold values of zero and one. For example, writing a location in sequence with 1,1,0 will result in a measurable [ though below threshold ] difference than if it had been 1,0,0. Seagate and the like do their best to squeeze this to the absolute minimum, thus maximizing utilization of the magnetic disc. I suspect it is much harder to recover anything meaningful from a 1TB platter than from a 5MB platter.
The other leak is with remapped sectors. Remapped sectors may contain live data, but have been switched out of use because they were unreliable. Flash has the same problem.
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda takes care of the first problem - if you more paranoid than that, you should probably stop whatever it is you are doing.
You need a custom tool to access the remapped sectors.
Re:I find a Magnet Works (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I find a Magnet Works (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're really want to have fun, you should take the magnet out of the drive. Those things area amazing. I had a co-worker who pulled the magnets out a whole slew of retired 5" hard drives. You could hang incredible amounts of weight from those things. Very easy to smash your fingers between them too. Just don't do it on your employer's time.
oh yeah, you could use that magnet to wipe the platter while you've got the drive open.
My favourite method for 3.5" HDDs - the best imho (Score:3, Interesting)
- Take old drive.
- Screw drive apart. (Might require Torx screwdriver or bit)
- Take percision manufactured aluminum seperation washers and use them as keyrings, strap-loops or simular stuff.
- Take drive platters and work over them with fine grained sandpaper.
- Move head magnets over them a few times.
- Work over them with even finer grain afterwards.
- Dishwash platters and polish afterwards.
- Dry and clean platters.
- Precisely glue thick undied felt to one side of platter using cut-to-fit carpet tape.
- Cut out platter shape and hole with a sharp knife.
- Use and/or sell as avantgarde design coasters (10$ - 12$ a piece).
- Bring the rest of the dives to recycling, seperating electronics from scrap metal first.
No way anybody will recover any usefull data of a platter after this treatment. And the platter will look like in mint condition. And they make way cool coasters.
Re:In other news (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that modern hard drives do automatic defect mapping. The end result is that sometimes important data can be written to a sector, and then the drive will decide that sector is unreliable and map it out. That sector can no longer be accessed in any way. As a result you have a sector which contains data but cannot be wiped because the drive won't let you write there.
Flash memory is even worse since it does write balancing between all cells to PREVENT a failure of a sector, rather than deciding a sector is on its way out and mapping around it then.
Re:DOD Guidlines. Re:"The only fireproof (Score:5, Interesting)
About a decade ago, our artillery unit did do "rollovers" on hard drives for the intel unit. The drives, although already drilled through, were stored in a safe and ecsorted by Military Police. After we ran them over, the pieces went back into the safe. After the drilling and crushing, the drives were to be put into a 55 gallon barrel (along with wood or paper), doused in fuel, and burnt for a minimum of 30 minutes.
Re:In other news (Score:3, Interesting)
Closet redneck that I am, I usually just make a big pile of wood, drives, old backup tapes, and add gasoline. You can pass the melting point of lead in a wood fire, easy.
The waste is an issue though. I wouldn't want to eat out of the oven either, and I'm not too keen on breathing/cleaning up drive slag either.
Re:In other news (Score:3, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I work in an industry where we DO worry about people taking drives to the clean room...
Re:This is overthinking. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to do it really right, then use whatever handy utility you know of that claims to write over the whole drive. Just once. With zeroes.
I'd quibble over that "With zeroes" part. The problem is that this overwrites each bit with the same value. On a lot of kinds of disks, this leaves behind a lot of disks that have two distinguishable value, which are easily read and interpreted as zeroes and ones, giving the previous data. The data-recovery people have equipment that can read the value of each "bit" to several decimal places, and overwriting tends to leave a portion of the previous magnetization. So instead of bits reading 1.00 and 0.00, they'll read 0.04 and 0.00, for example.
This is why it's better to use software that overwrites with random values, and does it N times. This way, a string of bits that were all zeroes and ones come out with values like 0.93, 0.02, 0.04, 0.96, 1,.01, 0.08, 0.98, 1.02, 0,91, etc. Each of these is a sum of the last random value and N earlier nearly-erased values, and there's no way to pull out the original bits.
Of course, this is mostly for when you want to reuse the disk or sell it. If you truly want to dispose of it, melting is probably better, and a lot simpler.
Or, as others have suggested, install Vista on it. That has a good record of making the disk useless to everyone.
Re:DOD Guidlines. Re:"The only fireproof (Score:3, Interesting)
How we declassified disks in the 1980s (Score:3, Interesting)
Back in the 1980s and early 90s, when I was working as a tool for the military-industrial complex, I ran a VAX lab that processed classified information. I forget which DoD standard we followed (it was equivalent to Army 380-380), but I got to write our declassification processes and my successor at the job had the fun of implementing them. The basic choices were
Our building had a machine shop in the basement, and my successor got to take apart the RM05 removable drives (which were about the size of a Tupperware cake carrier and had a dozen 14" platters), and have the machinists sandblast them for her. The canonical Sysadmin Wall Decoration in those days was to have a disk platter with some tracks scratched off it from a head crash; she had one that was clean down to the bare metal.
Re:In other news (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I find a Magnet Works (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:DOD Guidlines. Re:"The only fireproof (Score:3, Interesting)
Then they play with the magnents, figuring out ways to ruin each others credit cards from a distance.
Re:Environmentally criminal! (Score:1, Interesting)
In theory that's great, but have you actually tried this?
I had a hard drive with a damaged circuit board on the bottom. I got another drive from the same manufactured batch, nearly all numbers on the drive were identical, it was only a few serial numbers apart. I swapped the circuit board on the bottom, didn't even have to open the drive up and expose the platters, and it wouldn't read the data.
I think the drives are each calibrated to their individual platters when they're assembled. The calibration markings on the bottom didn't match.
What are your experiences?
Re:No you don't. (Score:3, Interesting)
I built a kiln out of a trash can, ceramic fiber mat, and some venturi propane burners made from 3/4" pipe. I've fired to Cone 4 (2124ÂF - 1162ÂC) in it. Cost about $200 to make. Would be cool to get a crucible and melt down a drive or two. I have some old scsi stuff from the 90's...