If new hard drives are being purchased

[Jawge]

for the contractor general's office (hot swapable) yuh done know

Also the courts can demand the old drives (as soon as the new ones are mirrored from the old)

Here the feds take the whole thing. I was told by someone that the feds have a machine they attach and everything (and I mean everything) is sucked over in mins.

Ah the Info age

[Willi]

Germans had something better.

Even the HDs destroyed in 911 were not unavailable. They managed to extract most of the data from burnt up machines.

I think the name was Convergence systems, cant really recall now.

[Assasin]

Just formatting a disk or creating a partition don't mean info is still not there these days, you have fi use special tools

[Jawge]

Good, so what are we waiting for?

Let's do this

[Jawge]

these days? heh, heh,

[Karl]

Good, so what are we waiting for?

Let's do this

Why yuh so bad?
...as mi seh tuh Lazie and Gamma, let the chips fall where they may!

[Willi]

I agree.

Surprised??

Mi nuh hold any sacred cows.

However, priority must be given to dealing with those who pilfer public assets!

[Karl]

I agree.

Surprised??

Mi nuh hold any sacred cows.

However, priority must be given to dealing with those who pilfer public assets!

Priorty?
That may hold when you have one, two or three working. When you have an entire government apparatus you work on a vast many fronts all at the same time. No reason why seeking to get to the bottom of Kern's mis-steps should be not done 'immediate' even as many, many other things...including having the CG's department probe...are simultaneously being done. Neither should cause a slowing down of the other.

[Hortical]

Gasoline and matches should do the trick, if that does not work, how bout leaving it in the bathroom tank for a week?

I have a hard drive that crashed, and mi can't access the drive. What should I do to destroy the contents?

[Karl]

Gasoline and matches should do the trick, if that does not work, how bout leaving it in the bathroom tank for a week?

I have a hard drive that crashed, and mi can't access the drive. What should I do to destroy the contents?

I wonder if this is true - Someone told me to poor water over the hard-drive.

When I left New York I took a sledge-hammer to the hard-drive I was throwing out and turned the waterhose on it for about 30 or so minutes.

[Willi]

So you dont think Govt have to prioritize????

Well then I have a laundry list!

[Willi]

Acid should do the trick. LoL

Coca Cola as well.

[Hortical]

Fail-Safe Techniques Erase Magnetic Storage Media

Fail-Safe Techniques Erase Magnetic Storage Media

Researchers use powerful magnets to permanently delete information

Atlanta (June 12, 2006) —After a U.S. intelligence-gathering aircraft was involved in a mid-air collision off the coast of China four years ago, the crew was unable to erase sensitive information from magnetic data storage systems before making an emergency landing in Chinese territory.

That event underscored the need for simple techniques to provide fail-safe destruction of sensitive data aboard such aircraft. Working with defense contractor L-3 Communications Corp., scientists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have developed a series of prototype systems that use special high-strength permanent magnets to quickly erase a wide variety of storage media.

Senior Research Technologist Christopher Shappert (standing) and Senior Research Scientist Michael Knotts image a hard disk drive platter using magnetic force microscopy. (Georgia Tech Photo: Gary Meek)
300 dpi Hi-Res Version
Developed so far for VHS tapes, floppy drives, data cassettes, and small computer hard drives, the techniques could also have commercial applications for banking, human resource and other industries that must also protect sensitive information.

“This is a very challenging problem,” said Michael Knotts, a research scientist in the GTRI’s Signature Technology Laboratory. “We had to verify that the data would be beyond all possible recovery even with unlimited budget and unlimited time. Commercial devices on the market for data erasure just couldn’t fill the bill, because they were magnetically too weak, they were physically too large and heavy, or they didn’t meet stringent air safety standards.”

During the project, the researchers developed testing procedures that use a magnetic force microscope (MFM) – a variation on the atomic-force microscope (AFM) more commonly used to provide detailed images of surfaces at the nanometer scale. The MFM mapped the very small magnetic perturbations created by data stored on the media, helping determine how well data patterns had been destroyed.

“If you erase the data by whatever means, you should see a surface devoid of any specific pattern or periodicity,” Knotts explained. “Our goal was to see a random distribution of magnetization that would indicate a clean disk.”

During the three-year project, Knotts and collaborators Don Creyts, Dave Maybury, Candy Ekangaki, and Tedd Toler explored a broad range of possible destruction techniques, including burning diskettes with heat-generating thermite materials, crushing drives in presses and chemically destroying the media.

Research Engineer David Maybury models magnetic a data destruction circuit using 3D finite element analysis. (Georgia Tech Photo: Gary Meek)
300 dpi Hi-Res Version
The researchers had to select techniques and equipment that would:

* Be light enough for aircraft use and operate independently of aircraft electrical systems;

* Be mechanically simple to ensure reliable operation;

* Produce no harmful gases or flame;

* Provide mechanisms to prevent inadvertent erasure.

During their first year of work, the researchers learned that data could remain on diskettes that had been subjected to high heat, and had to abandon thermal destruction techniques because of the fire and harmful gases they generated. That left only magnetic techniques.

In developing techniques for complete erasure, the researchers first had to learn how different data storage drives operate, then assess the magnetic field levels necessary for complete erasure. To do that, they obtained a number of commercially-available micro-drives, cut the media into sections, subjected them to varying magnetic fields, and then tested the sections with the MFM.

“We had to understand how the data is laid out on the disk so we could know where to look for the patterns, and we had to do a lot of measurements to determine exactly what kind of magnetic field is needed to destroy all data,” said Knotts. “We had to do a lot of destructive testing to determine that, and our lab is littered with the carcasses of dead hard drives to prove it.”

Producing a magnetic field sufficient to destroy data patterns required the use of neodymium iron-boron magnets custom-designed for the project and special pole pieces made of esoteric cobalt alloys. The magnets, which weigh as much as 125 pounds, had to produce fields sufficient to penetrate metallic housings that surround some drives.

“We developed models for magnetic circuits that we could run through optimization codes to design the best shape to get the field that we needed,” Knotts said. “It takes quite a magnetic field to get through the steel enclosures on some of the drives. We are producing magnetic fields comparable to those used in magnetic resonance imaging equipment, so these are not your ordinary refrigerator magnets.”

Mechanically, the researchers faced challenges in reliably moving data storage devices through the magnetic fields. In some cases, aircraft crews would simply insert removable media into a motorized mechanism that pushes them past the magnets, while for other media, crews would have to twist a knob and pull drives out of their enclosures and through a magnetic field. To prevent accidental erasure, each technique requires several deliberate steps.

With success in erasing removable media and small hard drives, the researchers are moving onto a final phase of the project, which will involve large computer hard drives partially encased in thick steel caddies.

Beyond Department of Defense applications, the magnetic erasure techniques could have applications to the commercial world, where banks, human resource agencies and other organizations must ensure complete destruction of data in computer equipment being discarded.

Knotts admits he’ll be a bit sad to see the project end.

“This was certainly an unusual project,” he said. “It’s not often that we get paid to crush equipment in presses, blow things up and set off fires in microwave ovens.”

[Hortical]

Nails are the best physical method

Hardware

Going. Going. Gone! Not!

Once again reports about how data can be recovered from hard drives bought secondhand online hits the headlines:

"Organisations are failing to remove important information from computer hard drives when they dispose of them, researchers are warning."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4272395.stm

This time a group from University of Glamorgan bought 105 hard drives from online auction site eBay and examined them. Of the 105 the group were able to access data on 92 of them and 57% of the drives contained information that allowed them to be traced back to the original owner, whether that be an individual or organization.
This is a growing problem, has hard drive capacities grow and people need more space, the pace at which people upgrade is growing. And close on the heels of these people that buy new hard drives are those that want to save some money and buy them second hand. Problem is, with so many drives containing what could be valuable data it is likely that many of these second hand hard drive are falling in the hands of criminals, scammers and spam merchants who want to use the data left on the hard drive for their own gain.
Let's be clear here, mot of these aren't examples of badly wiped drives - most of these are drives that were never wiped in the first place. It's staggering how many people will dispose of a hard drive that contains data by throwing it into the bin. More staggering is the number of people that will sell their hard drive complete with data. Some of these drives undoubtedly come from people who have upgraded drives for others and kept the old drive "for disposal", later disposing of it by selling it.
Hard drive facts

• If you take a hard drive for one system and plug it into another, there is an excellent chance that it used and the data read and copied off of it.
• Deleting the data offers no protection. Deleted data can be "undeleted" just as easily as it was deleted
• Formatting a hard drive offers so little protection against the data being recovered that it's a joke to even suggest it - it usually takes longer to format a drive than it does to "unformat" it!
• The only guaranteed way to ensure that the data is unrecoverable off a hard drive is to destroy the hard drive.

Secure deleting
There are a number of software utilities available that claim to be able to securely wipe hard drives of their contents. Some are commercial (in other words you need to pay for them), some are free. These utilities delete the data and then overwrite the entire hard drive with zeros, ones, random data or a combination of all. The greater the number of passes on the hard drive, the greater the security. Believe it or not, security continues to improve with each additional overwrite up to 28 overwrites of the drive (the reason for this is rather odd and a little complex and can wait for a later article perhaps). For the normal user though, consider 7 overwrite (or passes) as ample security.
However, just because something claims to do something doesn't mean that it does it. There is a lot of snakeoil in the security world (snakeoil is something that claims to do one thing but doesn't actually do it, or perhaps not as well as it claims). Most users couldn't tell the difference between a program that had deleted data or a program that had securely deleted it. For most people, paying $10, $25 or $50 adds to the perceived quality of the utility and the security that it offers. Don't be fooled. There are good utilities to be found for nothing.
The best is called Darik's Boot and Nuke and is available from http://dban.sourceforge.net/. Don't be fooled by the odd name of the fact that it's free, this tool is part of the National Nuclear Security Administration suite of security tools! If it's good enough for them, it should be good enough for us.
Darik's Boot and Nuke, or DBAN, is a robust and secure eraser (I know, I've looked at both the code and at drives cleaned by it and this utility really does what it says it will do) that allows you to carry out different types of wipe, ranging from quick erase (not very secure) to extra-secure Gutmann or PRNG (PseudoRandom Number Generator) Stream wipes.
To top that off:

• DBAN supports all available IDE disk drivers.
• DBAN supports all available SCSI disk drivers.
• DBAN runs on all 32-bit x86-class computers (Pentium, Athlon, and others) with at least 8 Mb of RAM.

When to wipe drives
Remember to wipe drives before:

• Selling a hard drive
• Selling a PC (if you are selling one with an operating system, wipe the drive and reinstall the operating system)
• Sending a hard drive back under warranty (this might not always be possible - consider what data you have stored and decide whether you want to carry on with a warranty exchange or would rather buy a new drive as new drives are relatively cheap)
• Before storing an unneeded hard drive for an extended period (it's easy for old hard drives to be thrown out with data on them - wiping them before storage eliminates this risk)

Physical destruction
If you want to physically destroy a hard drive it can be done easily - all you need is a hammer and a between one and four six-inch nails. One nail if you want the lowest security, four is you want the maximum. Simple remove the drive from the PC, place the drive on a surface that you can work on (the ground is good, with some wood underneath you, floorboard and so on are bad, unless you want a hard drive nailed to the floor of your home or office) then hammer the nails through the case.
The diagram below shows the approximate positions for each of the four nails (it varies from drive to drive but since we are using hammer and nails here this isn't exactly rocket science!).

If you are totally, seriously, paranoidly concerned about data recover, then open your hard disk, grind down the platters and chuck all the bits into a furnace.

[Karl]

Fail-Safe Techniques Erase Magnetic Storage Media

Researchers use powerful magnets to permanently delete information

Atlanta (June 12, 2006) —After a U.S. intelligence-gathering aircraft was involved in a mid-air collision off the coast of China four years ago, the crew was unable to erase sensitive information from magnetic data storage systems before making an emergency landing in Chinese territory.

That event underscored the need for simple techniques to provide fail-safe destruction of sensitive data aboard such aircraft. Working with defense contractor L-3 Communications Corp., scientists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have developed a series of prototype systems that use special high-strength permanent magnets to quickly erase a wide variety of storage media.

Senior Research Technologist Christopher Shappert (standing) and Senior Research Scientist Michael Knotts image a hard disk drive platter using magnetic force microscopy. (Georgia Tech Photo: Gary Meek)
300 dpi Hi-Res Version
Developed so far for VHS tapes, floppy drives, data cassettes, and small computer hard drives, the techniques could also have commercial applications for banking, human resource and other industries that must also protect sensitive information.

“This is a very challenging problem,” said Michael Knotts, a research scientist in the GTRI’s Signature Technology Laboratory. “We had to verify that the data would be beyond all possible recovery even with unlimited budget and unlimited time. Commercial devices on the market for data erasure just couldn’t fill the bill, because they were magnetically too weak, they were physically too large and heavy, or they didn’t meet stringent air safety standards.”

During the project, the researchers developed testing procedures that use a magnetic force microscope (MFM) – a variation on the atomic-force microscope (AFM) more commonly used to provide detailed images of surfaces at the nanometer scale. The MFM mapped the very small magnetic perturbations created by data stored on the media, helping determine how well data patterns had been destroyed.

“If you erase the data by whatever means, you should see a surface devoid of any specific pattern or periodicity,” Knotts explained. “Our goal was to see a random distribution of magnetization that would indicate a clean disk.”

During the three-year project, Knotts and collaborators Don Creyts, Dave Maybury, Candy Ekangaki, and Tedd Toler explored a broad range of possible destruction techniques, including burning diskettes with heat-generating thermite materials, crushing drives in presses and chemically destroying the media.

Research Engineer David Maybury models magnetic a data destruction circuit using 3D finite element analysis. (Georgia Tech Photo: Gary Meek)
300 dpi Hi-Res Version
The researchers had to select techniques and equipment that would:

* Be light enough for aircraft use and operate independently of aircraft electrical systems;

* Be mechanically simple to ensure reliable operation;

* Produce no harmful gases or flame;

* Provide mechanisms to prevent inadvertent erasure.

During their first year of work, the researchers learned that data could remain on diskettes that had been subjected to high heat, and had to abandon thermal destruction techniques because of the fire and harmful gases they generated. That left only magnetic techniques.

In developing techniques for complete erasure, the researchers first had to learn how different data storage drives operate, then assess the magnetic field levels necessary for complete erasure. To do that, they obtained a number of commercially-available micro-drives, cut the media into sections, subjected them to varying magnetic fields, and then tested the sections with the MFM.

“We had to understand how the data is laid out on the disk so we could know where to look for the patterns, and we had to do a lot of measurements to determine exactly what kind of magnetic field is needed to destroy all data,” said Knotts. “We had to do a lot of destructive testing to determine that, and our lab is littered with the carcasses of dead hard drives to prove it.”

Producing a magnetic field sufficient to destroy data patterns required the use of neodymium iron-boron magnets custom-designed for the project and special pole pieces made of esoteric cobalt alloys. The magnets, which weigh as much as 125 pounds, had to produce fields sufficient to penetrate metallic housings that surround some drives.

“We developed models for magnetic circuits that we could run through optimization codes to design the best shape to get the field that we needed,” Knotts said. “It takes quite a magnetic field to get through the steel enclosures on some of the drives. We are producing magnetic fields comparable to those used in magnetic resonance imaging equipment, so these are not your ordinary refrigerator magnets.”

Mechanically, the researchers faced challenges in reliably moving data storage devices through the magnetic fields. In some cases, aircraft crews would simply insert removable media into a motorized mechanism that pushes them past the magnets, while for other media, crews would have to twist a knob and pull drives out of their enclosures and through a magnetic field. To prevent accidental erasure, each technique requires several deliberate steps.

With success in erasing removable media and small hard drives, the researchers are moving onto a final phase of the project, which will involve large computer hard drives partially encased in thick steel caddies.

Beyond Department of Defense applications, the magnetic erasure techniques could have applications to the commercial world, where banks, human resource agencies and other organizations must ensure complete destruction of data in computer equipment being discarded.

Knotts admits he’ll be a bit sad to see the project end.

“This was certainly an unusual project,” he said. “It’s not often that we get paid to crush equipment in presses, blow things up and set off fires in microwave ovens.”

Guess my sledge and water technique did not work

...oh well who the hell would want my SS#, age, bank records, etc., etc???