When you're a government contractor you had better keep your ducks in line. It goes without saying that if you're storing sensitive data that you dispose of the hard drives properly at the end of their life (EOL). BT's Security Research Center has found that Lockheed Martin is notoriously bad about not removing the data from hard drives that it disposes of at their EOL. The list of information pulled from hard drives that were originally owned by Lockheed Martin is disturbing, the information includes: "launch procedures were found on a hard disk for the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) ground to air missile defense system, used to shoot down Scud missiles in Iraq." and "other sensitive information including bank account details, medical records, confidential business plans, financial company data, personal id numbers, and job descriptions."
All of the hard drives were purchased on eBay or at computer auctions/fairs. It's a growing trend that computer technicians are unaware of how to properly dispose of a hard drive by either destroying it or removing the sensitive data in a manner that allows for no possible recovery of data. Another alarming thought is why was this data not encrypted?
Lockheed Martin was not the only corporation to be found at fault for this practice but by far had the most sensitive data.
Atleast we can get the data back when someone just formats the disk accidently. May be during OS partitioning, installation, etc.
way too old school. thats why we needed new people in there. Best thing for a company is hire some hackers. Not put them in jail. Then you get idiots giving out top secret stuff to ebay. ZERO the drive idiots!!
It's really funny that all this is found on eBay that too without wiping the data using strong methods.
Not entirely true, you CAN recover data that was writen over, if you have a lot of money and the correct tools
and you need some luck and good algorithms to fill in the blanks
Only thing I'd like to recover is files off a Syquest Syjet 1.5 gb drive. 2 of them are too full for XP. and doesn't seem to run in 98 for the moment. anybody who can point me in the direction of a cheap place.. can probably keep the drive. But most recovery places are about $500 or so. oh how 1.5 gb used to mean something lol
http://16systems.com/zero.php < I'll just leave this here...
See also: Data erasure
When data have been physically overwritten on a hard disk it is generally assumed that the previous data are no longer possible to recover. In 1996, Peter Gutmann, a respected computer scientist, presented a paper that suggested overwritten data could be recovered through the use of Scanning transmission electron microscopy.[4] In 2001, he presented another paper on a similar topic.[5] Substantial criticism has followed, primarily dealing with the lack of any concrete examples of significant amounts of overwritten data being recovered.[6][7] To guard against this type of data recovery, he and Colin Plumb designed the Gutmann method, which is used by several disk scrubbing software packages.
Although Gutmann's theory may be correct, there's no practical evidence that overwritten data can be recovered. Moreover, there are good reasons to think that it cannot.[8]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_recovery
I remove the platers and chop them into tiny pieces and then dispose of them in at least 10 different places including the sewer.
I do this also for expired plastic bank cards and other sensitive information that is 6+ years old.
How about they employ me, pay me hundreds of thousands of pounds to get rid of their data, I will burn it all in a furness if they prefer it that way.
I do this also for expired plastic bank cards and other sensitive information that is 6+ years old.
How about they employ me, pay me hundreds of thousands of pounds to get rid of their data, I will burn it all in a furness if they prefer it that way.
You are either a pedophile or paranoid
The word is paedophile, to which I am not.
Paranoid I am not either, I have disposed of one Hard Drive only which contained information which was copyrighted to me.
The drive had died, so someone with skils maybe without losing data could had mounted them on a drive and recovered the data.
I had it backed up to another two drives and 40 DvD's.
So it was no big deal to get another hard drive and transfer the data to it.
lol
The word is pedophile..
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pedophile
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pedophile
Erm. Not in English.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pedophile
Erm. Not in English.
Yes, in english.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/paedophile
I do this also for expired plastic bank cards and other sensitive information that is 6+ years old.
How about they employ me, pay me hundreds of thousands of pounds to get rid of their data, I will burn it all in a furness if they prefer it that way.
You are either a pedophile or paranoid
or both :p
Secure Erase is a much better method if your motherboard allows it.
Paranoia can be a good thing when you're dealing with the DoD.
There are places that are starting to spring up that deal with electronics recycling. California instituted a program statewide for electronics recycling, with drop off points and everything. We (meaning the site where I work at) has a contractor that comes and takes care of our excess equipment on an as-needed basis.
Note: I am a bad speller.
- Is LM low on cash?
Computer Technicians?
How on earth are they computer technicians if they don't know how to destroy such data?
Computer Technicians. I've said it up thread. It is not your responsibility to know how to destroy data. In a large site, you might have contractors who maintain the hardware, and all they might do is pull a drive out that's failing, slap in a new one, run a script to reload your machine and walk away. That is the entire extent of their job, too. Machine failed? Drop a new one off at the desk that's been configured and have a nice day. (Where I work is a small site, so the techs there have to know how to troubleshoot hardware and software.)
They are fun to throw around too.
You'd think a person who takes apart hard disk drives would at least know it is called a platter.
At work we have a cupboard with 200+ dead / old drives. Every few years we get a company in to turn them into powder which they return to us in clear plastic bags
Not quite. The company turns up with a snazzy van kitted out with some industrial shredders. The drives are destroyed on-site, we could sit and watch them turn them to dust if we really wanted.
The price of security against the price of a second hand hard drive (which is likely to be a small capacity in this day and age anyway), what the hell are they playing at?
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