Yeah, it’s just a bit of an exaggeration.
A quench is a serious mishap, but it’s not one that’s going to happen because someone carried an iPod into the imaging suite.
They’re probably more concerned about some random little FCC Part B electronic device putting out interference that’ll mess with the imaging process, or getting sucked into the magnet.
IIRC, the situation is somewhat similar in the UK, you must hand over passwords for encrypted data on your PC if asked for in a court of law.
Wouldn’t the acid just eat through the filter in no time flat? Being very fine it would have a tremendous surface area.
It’s a pretty small hole. I think the acid would take a bit to seep in.
One could use the hole to inject something into the drive.
In fact, I think it would be pretty simple to automate the process. A small servo pushes a metal tube into the drive and a pump fills the drive with a liquid that eats the surface from the drive platter.
Store all your data to a self-destruct, Gypsy the Acid Queen NAS device. Cops bang on the door, just push a button. Inject, squrt,… No data.
But, for ease, just shread it
Here’s a better link then above.
That is fucking hilarious, though there was a time when I would have disagreed. I was tasked once to destroy old hard drives that had been in military computers and once I got over the “this is a damn shame - these drives are still serviceable” phase, I used a drill press to punch multiple hols in each unit. The shredder would been a lot faster, and cooler.
I did some work once for a company that did alot of Play Station repair/refurb work. They had a massive shredder like that in the back of the warehouse where they would destroy parts. Every now and again they would have pallets of repaired machines (or even unsold new machines on the rare occasion) and throw them in the shredder. I get the point of Sony not wanting those boxes making it onto the black/grey market… but man, that should have been a crime to destroy perfectly good Play Stations…
Very fun to watch, though.
So can simply drilling a hole in them make them unusable or even unrecoverable?
Depends on how much time & money you want to spend to recover it.
At the Computer Security course I took we were told that the most common method used by hackers was to simply drive a nail through the hard disk. They called it “grenading the hard disk” but Google has nothing on this. :dubious:
I dunno, I usually drilled four or five.
The problem with a hole in the disk is that it means the platter will now no longer operate in the drive it was designed to operate in… it’s bent now, and would probably bump into some other part of the mechanism if operated.
In most data recovery you slap the old platters in an otherwise perfectly good drive and then read them. If you can’t use a normal drive to do it… your recovery cost just went through the roof. Even if you’re the CIA and willing to go to extreme measures to get the data, it’ll take you a LONG time to get at it now.
IANAS(py), but I think this could be done. Nanoda mentioned an encrypted disk, and I think that would be part of it. The second part would be a special file with some kind of encryption key, that is needed in addition to your password to access the data. Then your “frag disk” (OK, thumb drive drive now) has two jobs. Wipe the encryption key from the system’s memory, and then go into a mode of continuously overwriting the location of the encryption key on the disk with random data. Without the key, even if they force you to give them your password, it would be useless.
There is just such a program. And it’s Freeware.
Truecrypt. Your encrypted container can be any type of file you want. With a sufficiently strong (random and long) password, it is essentially unbreakable.
Forget thermite.
No way. You’ll get my thermite when you pry it from my cold, dead…uh…
Well those dead hands might not be cold for long if they’re clutching thermite…
I occasionaly use Disk Cleanup and anti-virus software to open up free space on my drive, then defrag the disk to optimize.
Is there software available to take the free space…which in fact still has data but can be overwritten…and actually erase the data there?
Software that instructs the read/write heads to constantly reinforce each data bit’s magnetic polarity to prevent recovering previous overwrites?
Not just unbreakable, but deniable. You can have multiple layers of hidden data, so that the decyrption key the courts force you to hand over doesn’t reveal anything you don’t want it to. And there’s no way to prove whether the key you’ve given them is the only key or not.
If you wanted a software solution that would destroy your drive, you could write your own firmware for the drives themselves and then issue a special self-destruct command that would, say, crash the drive head into the platter, or fry the board. Of course, this would be difficult to do, and might not render the data uncoverable, but it does satisfy Hollywood’s model of “insert disk -> bork drive.”
I was just at a security trade show, and there were at least two vendors with machines that destroy drives.
One of them is a hydraulic press that punches large holes through the drive. Metal platters come out warped worse than a potato chip, and glass platters are pulverized. The data is still on the platters, but there’s not much remaining flat surface left on them.
The other uses a 13,000 gauss magnet and is approved by the NSA and DoD. According to the sales literature, this thing wipes off not only the data, but the “physical format” servo tracks as well. The enormous magnetic field also destroys the read/write heads. so there’s not a chance of the drive being re-used. Takes under a minute to process a drive, and can be yours for about $14,000.
PGP’s Freeware (v6.5) has a “Freespace Wipe” utility.