Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed • Hacker News Board

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#41

Post by ConcernedCoder » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 1:05 PM UTC

HPsquared wrote: post #18

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #4

Defense in depth is the reason.

It's a lot easier to verify the process. It's a lot easier to check that all the drives leaving the building are physically destroyed, than it is to verify that they contain no sensitive data.

a little off topic but the mob has been operating this way for years when it comes to risk management... dead men don't talk, no matter how trustworthy the individual might be, it's easier to put a bullet in someones head and be done with it, than to worry about what could happen later.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#42

Post by tyingq » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 1:06 PM UTC

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.

Not in normal circumstances, but maybe in high profile ones. I imagine they would have tried to do something if they found, for example, hard drive fragments that Snowden possessed. If not for real purposes, perhaps to demonstrate they tried everything.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#43

Post by TowerTall » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

hospitalJail wrote: post #37

slackfan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, you have never been on the IT side of any shop have you? The risks to keep running said hardware, or performance, or storage space, or power consumption or whatever are too high so you aren't going to be using it. So you decom it and do what, stick it in a closet? Decommissioned hardware that is put in storage inevitably walks home with an enterprising employee to whom the risks from the business perspective are…

>hardware, or performance, or storage space, or power consumption or whatever are too high I just upgraded my 10 year old laptop because I wanted to do AI Art locally. I ran video games, CAD, cellphone emulators, my programs, etc... on this computer and it still works. Heck, I still use it in a different room now. Its not the 2000s anymore, we don't need tons of processing power to open web browsers and M$ Office. De…

Within an enterprise hardware get decommissioned when the hardware warranty expires, which in many cases are 3 years (last time I checked).

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#44

Post by cameronh90 » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

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.

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 and memory, but nowadays with NAND and DRAM being soldered onto motherboards, do you really trust that's enough?

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#45

Post by chinathrow » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 1:10 PM UTC

ars wrote: post #3

Since when does bbc run ads pretending to be articles? This is an ad for cdi.

Why don't they have a requirement to disclose it?

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#46

Post by zaroth » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 1:13 PM UTC

pierat wrote: post #9

Now why don't these companies keep the drives in-house instead of destroying? That, I don't know. But aside that, regarding the encryption... If you used the drive without encryption at any time, then its possible to recover the unencrypted data. You'd need to guarantee that your drives were *always* used with encryption from the start to end. And that's a hard guarantee. So yeah, if they were leaving the org, I'd de…

I don’t think that’s how it works. With these drives the AES encryption is always being done by dedicated hardware on the drive, but by default the key is just a random value stored in NVRAM.

When you do a “secure erase”, the drive will internally regenerate a new key and overwrite it in its NVRAM. Crucially, the algorithm must be securely random and the old key must be reliably overwritten. But if those conditions are met - presto! Everything on the drive that was written with the old key is now unreadable and entirely unrecoverable.

If you actually want to “lock” the drive, the key would be generated by a KDF from the password, the one saved in NVRAM would not be used.

It’s more complicated than that, if you want to support enabling a password without wiping the drive. That would involve encrypting/decrypting a stored key with the password. But either way you can definitely secure erase a modern unlocked drive, if you trust the implementation!

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#47

Post by cameronh90 » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 1:15 PM UTC

hospitalJail wrote: post #37

slackfan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, you have never been on the IT side of any shop have you? The risks to keep running said hardware, or performance, or storage space, or power consumption or whatever are too high so you aren't going to be using it. So you decom it and do what, stick it in a closet? Decommissioned hardware that is put in storage inevitably walks home with an enterprising employee to whom the risks from the business perspective are…

>hardware, or performance, or storage space, or power consumption or whatever are too high I just upgraded my 10 year old laptop because I wanted to do AI Art locally. I ran video games, CAD, cellphone emulators, my programs, etc... on this computer and it still works. Heck, I still use it in a different room now. Its not the 2000s anymore, we don't need tons of processing power to open web browsers and M$ Office. De…

A typical office laptop is pretty useless after about five years.

Even if the standard consumer stuff works fine, all the annoying enterprise security and remote management software that you're required to deploy just seems to suck up more and more resources every year. Unless you're lucky enough to work in an industry where that sort of thing isn't needed...

But even if you forget the software side, most office workers don't take great care of their devices. Even a solid ThinkPad will often have bits falling off it after that amount of time.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#48

Post by NotYourLawyer » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 1:22 PM UTC

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.

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

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#49

Post by hallgrimur1471 » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 1:24 PM UTC

V__ wrote: post #39

pdimitar wrote: post #27

I find it strange how preachy a part of HN can get about less CO2 emissions and being eco-friendly but then unequivocally support en extremely eco-unfriendly initiative like physically destroying usable storage devices. If you have principles, this is your litmus test. Show everyone that your principles hold even when there's a risk for you (and that risk is only perceived IMO, and not real if you have good procedure…

> "They have a zero-risk policy. It can't be one in a million drives, one in 10 million drives, one in 100 million drives that leaks. It has to be zero." At some point human error will kick in, a firmware bug will prevent a complete override of the disk, or some new technology will be able to detect overridden data.

Yes but shredding the drives isn't zero risk either. For example, there is a risk a disk would be stolen before it reaches the shredding place.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#50

Post by jl6 » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 1:30 PM UTC

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.

Plus, wouldn’t you expect paranoid orgs to overwrite with zeros/random or crypto-shred the data before physically shredding the device?

It does seem far fetched that someone would go to the trouble of putting a 3mm chunk of platter on a testbed only to most likely recover something that may as well be random noise.