wiping old hard drives

BostonB

You'd need a massive magnet, a car speaker wouldn't do it.

Would you trust your data security to such a half baked method?

You'd need something like this http://garner-products.com/harddrive.htm

We usded to have an old smaller one in our office, its an electro magnet, about the size of a 2 or 3 shoe boxes. I've never seen it used.

infodox

BostonB: by format they meant "try to completely zero out before beginning the filling-with-trash-again". just like how DBAN, etc, work, except actually creating massive files then deleting them rapidly , a lot, so to cause more obfustication.

I still am a firm believer in destroying the things physically though.

BostonB

Someone that vague and loose with technical terms I wouldn't trust with a crayon. Besides it makes no sense to "try" something half assed when theres an easier and proven alternative, that works.

h57xiucj2z946q

/thread

BaconZombie

FOR SCIENCE !!!! -

http://www.zdnet.com.au/how-to-destroy-a-hard-drive-339293877.htm

BostonB

LOL.

Personally I drill a couple of holes in old drives through the platters when I'm dumping them. Not that's usually anything of much importance on them. Of course if the data is that important the drive should be encrypted in the first place.

BTW

Random wrote: »

i should add that i would like to sell them on.

Don't get much for destroyed drives.

infodox

The discussion of permenantly killing drives was as an intellectual/educational exercise. I think that for the OP, DBAN will do the job.

BostonB: I rarely if ever use the correct technical terminology for *anything*. I refer to things using more casual terms as there is no *need* for fancy words for them. I understand it, and the people I discuss things with people who get the idea, hence, no need for techno-jargon. As I learned a long time ago, technical jargon maketh not one an expert... Far too many charlatans out there who "talk the talk".

BaconZombie - Very interesting video Also, fun!

Random

i suppose i have nothing to hide from the cia / mi5 / kgb that theyre not gonna find out about me without the hdd. i suppose i mean personal photos / video / information etc when selling on a second hand hdd.

i suppose its nothing top top secret at the end of the day but at the same time its nice to have some piece of mind.

BostonB

infodox wrote: »

...BostonB: I rarely if ever use the correct technical terminology for *anything*. I refer to things using more casual terms as there is no *need* for fancy words for them....

I see, Like a driving instructor saying "go" or "stop", it doesn't really matter what you use.

edmund_f

- watches carefully -

Random

if i encrypt the whole partition with truecrypt and a randomly long password then it should be secure enough, right?

Capt'n Midnight

Random wrote: »

if i encrypt the whole partition with truecrypt and a randomly long password then it should be secure enough, right?

if using true crypt make the recovery disk (you will still need the password)
encryt the whole disk , some OS's use more than one partition

if your drive already has remapped sectors (SMART TOOLS) they will NOT be encrypted or over written unless you use CMRR or similar to wipe the drive.


While the drive is in the PC you are still at risk of someone recovering the password from RAM or usual trojans reading data on a live system.


Note that if you don't have backups then using truecrypt means you won't be able to recover your data from your drive when it dies.

http://www.tog.ie/ will be hosting a short talk on March 1st

Title: Data erasure for the security conscious and the overly paranoid pervert.


Blurb: Lets discuss some of the commonly used methods of data erasure and

why they might just be overkill due to the limitations of modern forensic investigation tools.
Will include a couple of live demos of file deletion and recovery (or lack there of).

Capt'n Midnight

infodox wrote: »

As an aside, good luck wiping USB keys. A person I know fairly well tells me that he had USB keys that had been wiped, formatted, and erased so much that they would no longer mount reliably, dating back as far as 2007 or so. Old, well abused and carefully erased devices. Yet one forensics officer with a copy of Encase was able to pull all kinds of **** from the drive, dating as far back as 2008 or so. This was recently as well.

Many flash devices have wear levelling so the device remaps sectors on the fly so when you save data or "overwrite" the data goes to physical sectors which have received less us.

a quick format of the drive and using something like sdelete to generate a large file that fills the entire drive and contains random data is a much better option than trying to "overwrite" existing files.

Simply piping random data to the drive will NOT work
Erasing individual files / folders will NOT work

for solid state it's fill the entire drive or nothing

Capt'n Midnight

BostonB wrote: »

Yes metal in a microwave not so clever.

Exposed 3.5" hard disk platters might work better than 2.5" platters since closer to a quarter wavelength

But if you don't dissemble the drive then the case will act like a Faraday cage and presumably you will just fry the board and not affect the platters.



If anyone has a spare microwave oven they would like to donate then this can be investigated further. :pac:

Capt'n Midnight

Wicklowrider wrote: »

Its a long time since I was involved in this level of support so please bear that in mind before flaming

Does this not still work?

http://www.computerhope.com/rdebug.htm#4


It was simple and free! Reduced any hdd to a physical piece of machinery and the computer couldn't see it until it was newly partitioned and formated

Not sure if it works with Logical Block Addressing etc.

In any event since it doesn't touch anything other than the first sector on the hard drive you can recover from it very quickly with gpart or testdisk.

In fact if wasn't for HDD's coming with recovery partitons etc recovery was even easier - back in the day you just setup a new partition, type of NTFS , start at 63 and stop at the end of the disk , the trickiest bit was remembering to set the partition active/boot

BostonB

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

...Simply piping random data to the drive...

I don't understand what that means, or how someone would do it?

BostonB

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

...If anyone has a spare microwave oven they would like to donate then this can be investigated further. :pac:

From experience, the microwaves don't work so well after these kinda tests. My Dad one put a Big Mac in the foam packaging in a microwave. The foam packaging melted, the smell was brutal. Another time he tried my Nasa metal finish Ceramic cup. Cue strange burning smell and noises from the microwave. Which never worked properly after that. I think he did a tinfoil container another time.

Capt'n Midnight

BostonB wrote: »

I don't understand what that means, or how someone would do it?

dd is available in most good operating systems, you can install cygwin to get it in windows, but note device names may be diff

this will trash the data on your drive if you are stupid enough to run it, but you may be overwriting the same physical sector several times
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdc3 bs=512

this won't wipe any folders or directory structures but because it's a file the SSD will know not to reuse any physical sectors
dd if=/dev/random of=/media/disk/bigfile bs=512

as for bs=512 ymmv sector / cache size / magic numbers to tweak speed
I usually use ddresuce for big jobs because it's rate adaptive and restartable and shows progress, but it doesn't work with /dev/random
you can use /dev/urandom , it may be faster than /dev/random depending on your hardware but will be less random

BostonB

I'm not a linux bod. Whats its purpose.

BaconZombie

*/Puts on Hackerspace Grey Hat */

We are having talks for Engineers Week in TOG Hackerspace and one is on this topic:

Title: Data erasure for the security conscious and the overly paranoid pervert.


Blurb: Lets discuss some of the commonly used methods of data erasure and
why they might just be overkill due to the limitations of modern forensic investigation tools.
Will include a couple of live demos of file deletion and recovery (or lack there of).
Speaker

Kevin McGlone
BIO
Kevin is a full time student studying computer forensics and security at Waterford institute of Technology. He founded the WIT Hackers Society in Jan2011 and was involved in the organisation of the CampusCon hacker conference. He loves hacking, forensics & networking.

http://www.tog.ie/2012/02/engineers-week-2/

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