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Couple's Supposedly Destroyed Hard Drive Purchased
Posted: 2006-06-03 07:31pm
by bilateralrope
A year ago, Henry and Roma Gerbus took their computer to Best Buy in Springfield Township to have its hard drive replaced.
Henry Gerbus said Best Buy assured him the computer's old hard drive -- loaded with personal information -- would be destroyed.
"They said rest assured. They drill holes in it so it's useless," said Gerbus.
A few months ago, Gerbus got a phone call from a man in Chicago.
"He said, 'My name is Ed. I just bought your hard drive for $25 at a flea market in Chicago,'" said Gerbus. "I thought my world was coming down."
Gerbus and his wife had good reason to worry.
A total stranger had access to the couple's personal information, including
Social Security numbers, bank statements and investment records.
Through information listed on the hard drive, the man in Chicago was able to contact the couple.
"He said, 'Do you want me to wipe it clean or send it to you?' I told him to send it to me. I wanted it in my hands," said Gerbus.
Gerbus received the hard drive a few weeks later.
As a precaution, the couple alerted the major credit bureaus to protect their information.
"I'm not leaving myself open to identity theft," said Gerbus.
Target 5's Tom Sussi contacted Best Buy to figure out how the Gerbus' hard drive wound up at a flea market outside Chicago.
Best Buy issued the following statement to Target 5.
"Our company values and places the utmost importance on maintaining the privacy of our customers. We will fully investigate these allegations."
In the meantime, Gerbus said he hopes the couple's private information didn't fall into the wrong hands. "I don?t know if we're going to have a problem," said Gerbus. "I just don't know."
I also have
this link to someone claiming that drilling holes isn't such an effictive way to destory them. He prefers a sledgehammer for destorying hard drives.
Personally, I keep hard drives till they stop working, or I can't fit them all into my computer.
Posted: 2006-06-03 07:32pm
by bilateralrope
could a mod please fix my tags ?
Posted: 2006-06-03 07:37pm
by Pezzoni
Even if the drive isn't working, the data is almost certainly recoverable: Nothing short of physically destroying the platters in the drive will get rid on the data.
Posted: 2006-06-03 07:43pm
by Captain tycho
This is why you invest in thermite.
Posted: 2006-06-03 08:02pm
by Admiral Valdemar
Or you simply use an XFS encrypted partition system. Even if stolen, there's no way anyone is reading it without the master password. Atomic force microscopy is pretty useless when nothing makes sense.
Posted: 2006-06-03 08:11pm
by Arthur_Tuxedo
This is my preferred method for hard drive erasure.
Posted: 2006-06-03 09:35pm
by Pu-239
Drive encryption is a bit overkill unless you have easily stolen computers, like laptops. Just run shred /dev/hda (/dev/sda for SATA) to nuke.
Posted: 2006-06-03 10:35pm
by Spanky The Dolphin
bilateralrope wrote:could a mod please fix my tags ?
Um, you can freely edit in the G&C Forum...
Posted: 2006-06-03 11:46pm
by SirNitram
This is why you dispose of hard drives with fireworks.
Posted: 2006-06-03 11:55pm
by Joe
How would a woodchipper handle a hard drive if you took off the metal?
Posted: 2006-06-04 12:14am
by RedImperator
The data is stored on the surface of the platters, right? A belt sander should make short work of it.
Posted: 2006-06-04 12:35am
by Anarchist Bunny
Doesn't taking a good 2 lbs magnet and running over it several times do a pretty good job of fucking up stored data?
Posted: 2006-06-04 01:41am
by bilateralrope
Spanky The Dolphin wrote:bilateralrope wrote:could a mod please fix my tags ?
Um, you can freely edit in the G&C Forum...
I didn't even think to look.
Posted: 2006-06-04 01:42am
by bilateralrope
Anarchist Bunny wrote:Doesn't taking a good 2 lbs magnet and running over it several times do a pretty good job of fucking up stored data?
The Sledgehammer would be more fun.
Posted: 2006-06-04 01:45am
by Spanky The Dolphin
Joe wrote:How would a woodchipper handle a hard drive if you took off the metal?
You mean like just the platters themselves? They'd probably do the job fine.
Posted: 2006-06-04 02:09am
by RedImperator
One thing to note: smashing or shattering the platters would make the data unrecoverable to almost everyone, but if you're completely paranoid and want to make sure the black helicopter people can't read your old emails, you need to completely destroy the surface, because even a shattered platter can still have recoverable data. That's why I like the belt sander: fast, efficient, and 100% destructive. A few seconds with the right grain sandpaper should wipe out every last bit and byte on the drive.
And if that doesn't work, a grinder will, and that won't take much time either. If the surface is too tough for sandpaper, a grinder designed to shape metal will strip it right off and reduce it to powder so fine you could dispose of it with an electric fan. Just make sure you go over it twice so you don't miss anything.
Posted: 2006-06-04 03:08am
by Edi
There are also programs which destroy your data by writing every bit on the hard drive, and they usually do it twice, first to 0 and then to 1 or the other way around. Be mighty difficult to recover anything from that since the data exists only as transistor states and if all of the transistors have been reset to the same value and then reversed for good measure. It'll be like blankpaper fresh off the paper mill, doesn't matterif it's new or recycled, there's nothing on it.
Edi
Posted: 2006-06-04 03:38am
by Pu-239
Edi wrote:There are also programs which destroy your data by writing every bit on the hard drive, and they usually do it twice, first to 0 and then to 1 or the other way around. Be mighty difficult to recover anything from that since the data exists only as transistor states and if all of the transistors have been reset to the same value and then reversed for good measure. It'll be like blankpaper fresh off the paper mill, doesn't matterif it's new or recycled, there's nothing on it.
Edi
Um, data isn't stored on harddrives on transistors.
Posted: 2006-06-04 03:44am
by Ace Pace
Pu-239 wrote:Edi wrote:There are also programs which destroy your data by writing every bit on the hard drive, and they usually do it twice, first to 0 and then to 1 or the other way around. Be mighty difficult to recover anything from that since the data exists only as transistor states and if all of the transistors have been reset to the same value and then reversed for good measure. It'll be like blankpaper fresh off the paper mill, doesn't matterif it's new or recycled, there's nothing on it.
Edi
Um, data isn't stored on harddrives on transistors.
No, but it's basicly correct, it's something magnetic I forgot the name of, which does operate on a 1,0 basis.
Posted: 2006-06-04 04:45am
by Pezzoni
Edi wrote:There are also programs which destroy your data by writing every bit on the hard drive, and they usually do it twice, first to 0 and then to 1 or the other way around. Be mighty difficult to recover anything from that since the data exists only as transistor states and if all of the transistors have been reset to the same value and then reversed for good measure. It'll be like blankpaper fresh off the paper mill, doesn't matterif it's new or recycled, there's nothing on it.
Edi
I belive that with the right tools, it is still possible to recover the data, even after you've done that.
Posted: 2006-06-04 04:51am
by Ace Pace
Not if you do multiple overwrites.
Posted: 2006-06-04 05:21am
by Miles Teg
With very expensive hardware and plenty of time you can recover data from a drive that's been overwritten. But, unless you are really big time (think terrorist) they're not going to go through the effort. So, all the pirates can breath easy
Posted: 2006-06-04 05:31am
by Neko_Oni
Isn't the idea that data that's been on a HDD for a fair while leaves an imprint behind even if it's overwritten. Computers don't spot the trace, but the authorities might be able to extract it (why the hell are the authorities looking at your HDD anyway? What did you do? 'fess up).
Posted: 2006-06-04 05:33am
by Ace Pace
Neko_Oni wrote:Isn't the idea that data that's been on a HDD for a fair while leaves an imprint behind even if it's overwritten. Computers don't spot the trace, but the authorities might be able to extract it (why the hell are the authorities looking at your HDD anyway? What did you do? 'fess up).
Thats the reason behind multiple overwrites, destroying any imprint.
Posted: 2006-06-04 05:40am
by Netko
I've read a paper a while back about it, can't find it now. Apperantly, with newer drives, with their increased densities, it is sufficient to overwrite just twice plus a standard format to make data pretty much unrecoverable, even with various microscopy methods. Basicly, after those overwrites, the data is so scrambled that any (theoretical) recovery will be filled with enormeous gaps and no logical structure will survive. Which relegates recovery to recovering bit by bit. With current drives having capacities mesured in tens of gigabytes, the chances of recovering something useful, recognising it as something useful (remember, pure bit recovery here, absolutly no hints), and restoring it to an useful state are miniscule (IIRC in the hundreth of a percent range).
This paper was in response to an earlier one that recommended a 30-step overwrite procedure to be sure of the unrecoverability of data, but with the techology changes in the mean time (the original paper was from the early '90ies) many of the steps are no longer possible (modern drives don't allow such basic acsess to the actual platers) and with the increased density (the original paper considered drives of around 50 megabytes), even if the recovery is possible, data retrival chance is miniscule, as noted above.
IIRC, the overwrites should be one random then one uniform (all 1s).