Reporters find Northrop Grumman data in Ghana market
A team of journalists investigating the global electronic waste business has unearthed a security problem too. In a Ghana market, they bought a computer hard drive containing sensitive documents belonging to U.S. government contractor Northrop Grumman.
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Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
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destroy data:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hdc bs=4096and give it some hours time.
Physical destruction of disks
"The surest way to get your data off of a hard drive is to physically destroy it, Moulton said."enact june
Sorry, but that is absolute rubbish. Write 0's and 1's enough times over a disk using something like "Darik's Boot And Nuke" and no one can get the data back.
It annoys me that thinking the only way to destroy data is to physically break the disk. That just shows ignorance of how technology works.
Bad Blocks and Prcediural Errors
From the FA: the data recovered is from bad blocks (automatically remapped by the drive firmware and thus unwipeable) and from drives that were procedurally missed.It's a lot harder to "miss" a drive if your process is physical destruction, rather than a mere wipe: in the former case, a visual inspection will easily catch the oversight.
jimbob FAIL
If the data has been written to the sectors for a long time then overwritten several times in rapid succession then it's possible to recover the data with an SEM. In the past, this has been a manual, time-consuming process; today, it is probably possible to automate the process using typical data processing techniques.Nobody is going to do this to get your horse porn, jimbob. But they might do it to get government secrets, which could potentially be worth even more than integrated circuit designs... which are REGULARLY stolen by SEM inspection, as in there are whole companies based on it.
Reading comprehension
Why is it absolute rubbish to say that the SUREST way to do it is to physically destroy it? It doesn't say the only way, just the SUREST. If you tell me "Jimbob's boot and nuke" works just as well, should I take your word for it or pulverize the disk? Hmmmm, I'm not sure.Overwriting of data
You are obviously NOT an Engineer.You obviously know nothing about hard drives.
You are absolutely and positively wrong.
Physical destruction of hard drives
The article is correct: the surest way to destroy your data is physical destruction of the hard drive. Wiping the drive can be effective if the correct procedures are followed, but procedural errors can result in drives that are improperly wiped, or missed altogether when a batch of drives is sent by a company to be destroyed. If you realy want your data destroyed, there are machines available that will shred hard drives, or simply open it up and take a hammer to the platters.Ghana disks
I personally believe because of the nature of my work that to ensure the data can never be recovered is to run the disk thru a degausser and then grind it into itty-bitty shards using an industrial grinder. The purists out there believe that overwritting it with successive 1's and 0's is sufficient and for disks that don't have any sort of proprietary or classified data on them that would be fine. But if you have company or military secrets regardless of actual classification levels, then you really ought to grind them. Hard drives are cheap these days. I'm pretty sure Northrop could afford to destroy the hard drives.If you really want to ensure
If you really want to ensure the data can't be recovered by someone forgetting to perform an overwrite or degaussing the drive, use full disk encryption. Even if the data is still on the drive, it is unrecoverable without access to the associated decryption key. Assuming you use strong encryption, the drive is protected (at least long enough for the useful life of the data - in theory).replica bags
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