When ‘Format C:’ just isn’t good enough.
Posted by StormWarning on 28 Jun 2006 at 10:50 pm | Tagged as: Technology
Another in the series on cybersecurity.
How to destroy a hard drive in five seconds
By Ryan DeBeasi, NetworkWorld.com, 06/27/06
You are on a U.S. military aircraft, transporting hard drives with important, classified information, when you collide with another plane and are forced to land near an enemy intelligence agency. There is no time to delete the files, and the drives are in heavy-duty steel cases so that they are difficult to destroy. You have a few minutes before someone finds you, grabs the drives, and searches them for even the smallest trace of useful data. What would you do?…
…“Guard Dog”…requires no electricity and is powerful enough to overcome the magnetic shielding effect of steel casings.
“The [National Security Agency] has to destroy about 30,000 hard drives a year,” Knotts says. “Presently they do it by grinding them into powder or magnetically degaussing them” with a large electromagnet. These methods don’t work when there’s little time, power, and space…
…All programs, including “shredder” software, are unable to write or read from these “sequestered sectors” and so cannot remove data that might be left in them…
…“For the average person, software approaches are completely fine,” Knotts says, but a leak of even a few words of NSA information could be dangerous.
The Guard Dog destroys all the data on a drive, even in parts that computers cannot access, and it can erase any magnetic media…
Feel safe yet?
Whenever I’ve had a hard drive failure and replacement, I’ve stresed over how to ensure that none of my company’s data and information was available (to Dell, or to anyone who received my hard drive as a refurbished item). Think about detroying your hard drive the next time, and simply paying for a new one.
Technology
If rushed, a sledgehammer works best. Don’t try shooting one, they’re pretty tough and you’ll shoot your eye out. Or, if lacking heavy hammers, take a screwdriver and scrape it down the bottom as hard as you can. It won’t destroy the data, but it will slow someone down substantially. If you got 10 minutes or so, format c: and then run a batch file that appends text to itself forever.
As you can probably tell, I’ve had to destroy a few myself. I’ve got one hell of a bizarre story based out of my home town when the FBI forgot to destroy one and sold it as excess property.
Of course my biggest concern has been that my laptop remains my primary computer for my business. So much of the information on it is at minimum, “Company Confidential” that on the occasions that my hard drive has crashed and I’ve had to replace it, I’ve stressed over how to eliminate all of the data before sending it back to Dell.
Of course, I now realize that my best course of action is very likely to accept the cost of a new hard drive as a cost of security, and simply destroy the drive myself, rather than attempting to reformat it, or debug it, or any other software solution available.
I have thought of shooting it once or twice, especially the time a couple of years ago that I hadn’t fully backed up all of my data.
With the advent of flash memory, the stuff I consider confidential I just work straight off the flash card. It’s just as fast and much more portable. I don’t even use a laptop since my important stuff travels in my pocket and works on any computer. Hard drive crashes are an inconvenience still, but not the least bit critical to me. And, since it doesn’t use FAT or NTSC, when it’s deleted off the card, it’s gone forever. If that doesn’t make me feel secure enough, a hammer will assure that it will never reveal data again.