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Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

bbc.com

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Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#51

Post by hospitalJail »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #48
hospitalJail wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I call bullshit on this, unless you can show me a single example of this ever happening anywhere. Real world and lab conditions are different. Given how high stakes somethings can be, nothing would surprise me.

I can imagine lots of plausible/implausible things. If they’re not practically possible, I’m not gonna worry about them.

Oh for sure, you aren't a high value target.

Its why people don't worry about Apple and Privacy/Security. They arent the best in the business, but unless you are a VIP, no one is going to waste the latest 0click pegasus exploit on you.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#52

Post by tfandango »

rwmj wrote: post #33

My friend once worked at a place where the security policy was that every part of the PC including monitors was crushed and shredded. This was a financial services company, but nevertheless totally over the top.

In finance-tech and that's the way it is for us. I once embarked on a hopeless journey to get some old laptops piled up in the IT space, for an elementary school programming club. They would not sell or donate them despite them being perfectly useful laptops, even with the drives removed. I suppose they were worried about RAM? Anyway they got ground up into landfill I guess...

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#54

Post by kryogen1c »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #28

> The irony is that shredding devices is relatively risky today. The latest drives have 500,000 tracks of data per square inch. A sophisticated data recovery person could take a piece as small as 3mm and read the data off it, Mr Hands says. I call bullshit on this, unless you can show me a single example of this ever happening anywhere.

Don't forget that sensitive data is encrypted. The only thing harder than breaking bitlocker on a hard drive is breaking bitlocker on a random 0.5% chunk of hard drive unaligned with the r/w tracks.

Bullshit is too weak a word.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#55

Post by 404mm »

kryogen1c wrote: post #54
NotYourLawyer wrote: post #28

> The irony is that shredding devices is relatively risky today. The latest drives have 500,000 tracks of data per square inch. A sophisticated data recovery person could take a piece as small as 3mm and read the data off it, Mr Hands says. I call bullshit on this, unless you can show me a single example of this ever happening anywhere.

Don't forget that sensitive data is encrypted. The only thing harder than breaking bitlocker on a hard drive is breaking bitlocker on a random 0.5% chunk of hard drive unaligned with the r/w tracks. Bullshit is too weak a word.

Encrypted and stripped/sharded in most cases.

My employer just shredded somewhat new-ish enterprise grade SSD worth a few $M. It hurt to watch :(

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#56

Post by PaulKeeble »

There have been multiple challenges on hard drives with substantial reward offered for anyone able to take a basic formatted drive with a few MB of files that were overwritten with 0s and recovering the files. Not once did any company accept the challenge let alone complete it. Every data recovery company would tell you that is not possible.

Today we have secure erase which is necessary to clear SSDs and I doubt there is any actual technology to recover from thia mechanism. A lot of hysteria has been shown around drive clearing in the standards and until the standards reflect the reality of what is really possible and what is really sufficient I can not see companies changing.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#57

Post by harvey9 »

hospitalJail wrote: post #34
NotYourLawyer wrote: post #28

> The irony is that shredding devices is relatively risky today. The latest drives have 500,000 tracks of data per square inch. A sophisticated data recovery person could take a piece as small as 3mm and read the data off it, Mr Hands says. I call bullshit on this, unless you can show me a single example of this ever happening anywhere.

>I call bullshit on this, unless you can show me a single example of this ever happening anywhere. Real world and lab conditions are different. Given how high stakes somethings can be, nothing would surprise me.

You would need a lab in the real world to do this recovery, if it is possible.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#60

Post by throwaway22032 »

The thing I find bizarre about all of this is that 99.99% of the data people think is super important would only be interesting to a few very specific parties.

If you format a hard drive, and sell it on eBay through a generic username, then the person who buys that is not going to do some sort of FBI style forensics on the disk.

It would be like going through every single bin on every high street on the off chance that you happen across some celebrities' bank statements.

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