German Ministry of Education Throws Away PCs For 190,000 € Due To Infection
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: German Ministry of Education Throws Away PCs For 190,000 € Due To Infection
#2They did clean their servers. The slashdot title/summary are a bit misleading. Perhaps they wanted new PCs already and simply estimated that it might be a good time to upgrade rather than clean them?
Still wish they would've donated the PCs instead of throwing them away.
Re: German Ministry of Education Throws Away PCs For 190,000 € Due To Infection
#3They did clean their servers. The slashdot title/summary are a bit misleading. Perhaps they wanted new PCs already and simply estimated that it might be a good time to upgrade rather than clean them? Still wish they would've donated the PCs instead of throwing them away.
It's too expensive to make sure there's no recoverable data, that's why they generally don't. It's even too expensive to take them apart and parts are harder to donate as well (more work on the other end).
(On the other hand, if you're in IT there - very cheap computers! They usually trust their own personnel to be responsible and wipe everything properly/not look for anything before use. )
While it's sad I can understand where they're coming from.
Re: German Ministry of Education Throws Away PCs For 190,000 € Due To Infection
#4They did clean their servers. The slashdot title/summary are a bit misleading. Perhaps they wanted new PCs already and simply estimated that it might be a good time to upgrade rather than clean them? Still wish they would've donated the PCs instead of throwing them away.
It's too expensive to make sure there's no recoverable data, that's why they generally don't. It's even too expensive to take them apart and parts are harder to donate as well (more work on the other end). (On the other hand, if you're in IT there - very cheap computers! They usually trust their own personnel to be responsible and wipe everything properly/not look for anything before use. ) While it's sad I can under…
Its even more sad since its not that expensive at all to just run `dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda1` on 170 computers, thats what, a days worth of work for one skilled sysadmin?
Re: German Ministry of Education Throws Away PCs For 190,000 € Due To Infection
#5They did clean their servers. The slashdot title/summary are a bit misleading. Perhaps they wanted new PCs already and simply estimated that it might be a good time to upgrade rather than clean them? Still wish they would've donated the PCs instead of throwing them away.
Yeah, they simply decide to do an early upgrade instead of spending time to clean them then do a upgrade sometime later. I guess their only lack of foresight is for not donating these PCs away.
Re: German Ministry of Education Throws Away PCs For 190,000 € Due To Infection
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's too expensive to make sure there's no recoverable data, that's why they generally don't. It's even too expensive to take them apart and parts are harder to donate as well (more work on the other end). (On the other hand, if you're in IT there - very cheap computers! They usually trust their own personnel to be responsible and wipe everything properly/not look for anything before use. ) While it's sad I can under…
Its even more sad since its not that expensive at all to just run `dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda1` on 170 computers, thats what, a days worth of work for one skilled sysadmin?
If one PC is missed and some sensitive data is sold to a recycling company, and somehow somebody finds it and reports it, there is hell to pay in the press and potential liability. Why take the risk? There is no incentive to re-use these computers. Plus, let's face it, nobody wants old pc's anyway. I tried putting up a bunch of them for free on our local equivalent of Craigslist last year and nobody wanted them, I ended up paying a recycling company to come pick them up. (~ 3-4 year old machines, admittedly with 21" CRT monitors)
Re: German Ministry of Education Throws Away PCs For 190,000 € Due To Infection
#7Other than the title might suggest this happened at the (second highest) administrative level, the federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Landesministerium), not at the Bundesministerium. Also reportedly some of the machines were brand new so no need for "radical" upgrade methods for all of them.
The only good thing about this that federal auditing by the Landesrechnungshof seems to work, since they complained about it in their yearly report in the first place and it got only picked up by the press after that.
http://www.lrh-mv.de/land-mv/LRH_prod/LRH/Veroeffentlichunge... (german pdf, page 152)
Re: German Ministry of Education Throws Away PCs For 190,000 € Due To Infection
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its even more sad since its not that expensive at all to just run `dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda1` on 170 computers, thats what, a days worth of work for one skilled sysadmin?
If one PC is missed and some sensitive data is sold to a recycling company, and somehow somebody finds it and reports it, there is hell to pay in the press and potential liability. Why take the risk? There is no incentive to re-use these computers. Plus, let's face it, nobody wants old pc's anyway. I tried putting up a bunch of them for free on our local equivalent of Craigslist last year and nobody wanted them, I en…
I just got rid of 50 old pc's for one company I worked for, within seconds of placing an ad on marktplaats we had a taker, a couple of guys from Amsterdam came to pick them up an hour later.
I oversaw the hard drive removal, if you can't be trusted to be sure that you have removed the drives from those pc's before sending them to the recycler how can you be sure that you've done a proper job before sending them in to be scrapped? It's the exact same problem after all.
Re: German Ministry of Education Throws Away PCs For 190,000 € Due To Infection
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its even more sad since its not that expensive at all to just run `dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda1` on 170 computers, thats what, a days worth of work for one skilled sysadmin?
If one PC is missed and some sensitive data is sold to a recycling company, and somehow somebody finds it and reports it, there is hell to pay in the press and potential liability. Why take the risk? There is no incentive to re-use these computers. Plus, let's face it, nobody wants old pc's anyway. I tried putting up a bunch of them for free on our local equivalent of Craigslist last year and nobody wanted them, I en…
OK well fair enough but this is another thing I don't understand, maybe its cause I live in central europe but why the heck would you pay someone to recycle something? I gathered all my old hardware (~10 desktops) and sold it for scrap, theres actually lots of rare earth metals in there. All you have to do is take them apart and drive to your local metal recycling point, they give great prices by the kilo. You won't get rich but at least you know its not gonna pollute some dumpyard somewhere.
Its just weird for me because if you pay someone to recycle computers they do exactly that which means they get money from you and the scrap people for essentially just taking things apart (which is kinda fun right?).
Re: German Ministry of Education Throws Away PCs For 190,000 € Due To Infection
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's too expensive to make sure there's no recoverable data, that's why they generally don't. It's even too expensive to take them apart and parts are harder to donate as well (more work on the other end). (On the other hand, if you're in IT there - very cheap computers! They usually trust their own personnel to be responsible and wipe everything properly/not look for anything before use. ) While it's sad I can under…
Its even more sad since its not that expensive at all to just run `dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda1` on 170 computers, thats what, a days worth of work for one skilled sysadmin?
I'm no expert on these things, but my understanding is that simply doing `dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda1` is not enough to guarantee that the data isn't recoverable. In fact there seems to be some debate if any amount or combination of writes is enough to guarantee that the data is unrecoverable.