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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

#81

Post by WirelessGigabit »

TylerE wrote: post #72
cameronh90 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electronic devices keep state in all sorts of strange ways nowadays. If you have the money, the safest strategy is to shred everything rather than having to do a ton of research figuring out whether a given device needs it. For example, lots of people don't realise how many printers are vulnerable to recovering previously printed documents. In the past, you might have just opened it up and ripped out the hard disk an…

Why merely shred, when you can truck it down to your local steel mill and melt it in a blast furnace? Ain't nothing coming back from that.

Do I detect a reference to Terminator 2?

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#82

Post by JohnFen »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #62
JohnFen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For an actual HDD, maybe that would work. It doesn't work as well as you'd think on spinning platters, either. Although it does increase the amount of effort needed to read the data on them.

Why do you think it doesn't work as well as you'd think?

A read/write head does not follow precisely the same path every time. It has a positioning error that makes subsequent reads/writes take place slightly offset from earlier ones.

With the proper equipment and expertise (and helped out by the error correction mechanisms), you can recover a substantial amount of data that has been "overwritten" on an existing track.

This is why "data shredding" applications erase the old data by overwriting it with random data multiple times. That increases the chances that one of those writes will also write over any older data that was shifted slightly to the side.

But that's no guarantee. This problem is why organizations that need an extreme level of security require the complete physical destruction of the platters when decommissioning.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#83

Post by JohnFen »

crazygringo wrote: post #71

This article mentions disposing of hard drives that have reached their five-year mark and are no longer under warranty. Does anybody actually want hard drives this old? Isn't the whole point that the risk of failure and therefore data loss is too high by this point? Even if you're using them to store data redundantly, you're running the risk that when one drive fails, the backup will also encounter failure due to the…

> Does anybody actually want hard drives this old?

Sure, I would! I frequently use hard drives much older than this, and while I know there's an increased risk of failure, it has never happened to me -- so that risk appears to be quite tiny.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#84

Post by justapassenger »

Cryptographic encryption is safe for as long as your crypto is secure.

For any company dealing with sensitive data, relaying on it to resell seems like a horrible idea. It’s not hard to imagine sufficiently motivated attacker (likely state sponsored) just buying up drives and waiting few years for when they can easily break the encryption.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#85

Post by rcxdude »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #20
Gordonjcp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but a single pass of /dev/zero will destroy all the data beyond hope of recovery.

Not true at all. It’s ultimately very complex and device specific, which is why destruction is recommended.

There hasn't been a single public demonstration of this on a hard drive made after the 90s, nor any credible reports of private ones. So I wonder what your assertion is based on.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#87

Post by thedougd »

gumby wrote: post #65
thedougd wrote: post #7

Surprised it doesn't mention compliance frameworks as a culprit. NIST 800-88 calls for destruction if the data is highly sensitive and the drive is leaving the organization. Wrt risk management, it's not worth deviating from NIST. https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=91793...

who would want to claim that their data isn't "highly sensitive"? How embarrassing that would be! This isn't a sarcastic remark: I think a lot of human activity can be explained this way.

In particular, if the data doesn't belong to the hosting organization, but their clients, they probably have to consider it highly sensitive.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#88

Post by pixl97 »

toast0 wrote: post #79
crazygringo wrote: post #71

This article mentions disposing of hard drives that have reached their five-year mark and are no longer under warranty. Does anybody actually want hard drives this old? Isn't the whole point that the risk of failure and therefore data loss is too high by this point? Even if you're using them to store data redundantly, you're running the risk that when one drive fails, the backup will also encounter failure due to the…

If you have a good plan to recover from failures and you regularly monitor for pre-failure indicators, that the warranty expired shouldn't be a reason to drop the drives. A hard drive being in warranty or not doesn't indicate much about its likelyhood of working. There's a market for 5 year old hard drives that seem to be working, and at the same time, if you have budget, replacing your hard drives every 5 years will…

> not doesn't indicate much about its likelyhood of working. T

Statistically I would say it does very much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

Also drives can start building up bad sectors that you cannot write to, but may be able to read data from.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#89

Post by pixl97 »

tfandango wrote: post #52
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...

There is a lot of NVRAMs in devices these days that could store potential secrets. Even things like wireless cars and internal USB devices. Another good example of this is laptops, such as Apple laptops with the SSD soldered on board.

You can either make hundreds of policies that discover where all this data is, or you make one policy that destroys everything.

I know which one has the least risk.

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