News Hard drive secrets sold cheaply

Oops. This from the Beeb:

A hard drive containing sensitive information on one of Europe's largest financial services groups has been purchased on an internet auction site for just a fiver.

The hard drive was bought as part of research into what happens to lost or stolen laptops.

It contained information including pension plans, dates of birth and home addresses of customers.

The research was conducted by security firm Pointsec Mobile Technologies.

More here

Companies really should be employing a destructive format of the data on the HDD - something that overwrites the platers with crap (overlaying the data several times with random garbage, then deletes the files from the FAT)

 

hahha,lmao owned...

God...Idiots. They should just do a quick format..I mean under 20secs?.

Sc0rian

 

Which would be as good as doing nothing. Stuff can still be recovered after formating - hence the need to 'destroy' the data first before burning the FAT and formating.

 

yer, quick format just sets the flags to 0, but the data is still there. to do it properly, all the blocks on the HDD need to be be set to 1 or 0, therfor the data no longer exists

 

a quick format would do the job in most cases. I know that when i get a used hard drive i dont whip out data recovery programs and frantically start scrounging around on the off chance that i can find some useless information about people. I may, however, look at the contents of the drive if it had not been formatted at all.

 

I disagree.
Quick formating IS useless.

If a company stores sensitive personal information on its hard drives it should use proper secure formating methods.

Whilst you and others might not start trying to recover data from second hand hard drives, there are others that would do, hence the need for proper data erasing.

 

The problem with formatting HDDs is that Windows by itself is unable to completely destroy the data on the drive. This is why almost all of the HDDs at eBay will still contain recoverable data. You can however, use tools like the HDD tools from Western Digital to set all bits on the drive to 0. There are numerous other tools, which delete the data even more safely by doing random passes on the HDD, thus making the data almost totally unrecoverable.

 

the police and other authorities can retrieve data from hard drives that have been smashed, burnt, snapped and pretty much beaten to death. So i doubt a quick format would trouble a data retrieval type person for long

 

yeh true. If someone has the knowlodge to it.

 

High Level Formatting:
1) Quick Format - wipes and recreates the FAT, leaves the data intact.
2) Normal Format - wipes and recreates the FAT, does a CHKDSK, marks any bad sectors, leaves the data intact.

Low Level Formatting:
Creates the tracks and sectors on a hard disk (the physical format that dictates where data is stored on the disk). For hard drives this is done at the factory, not by an end-user (usually!).

If you want to render data unrecoverable to the simpler methods of recovery, you must overwrite it in a series of "wipes". After just one pass, data is still able to be recovered due to the way hard drives write the bits to the disk, using just enough magnetic force to set the bit that needs writing and not those adjacent.

The first pass would usually write a pattern over the bits (e.g. 1011001011).
The second pass would then write the complement over the top (i.e. the reverse - 0100110100)
The third pass would then be a random pattern.
Further passes would either do the same again, or just more random patterns.

The 3 pass wipe is what the Department of Defence classify as Sanitation.

Of course if there's something on the disk you never want to be recovered, you should get out a huge electromagnet, degauss the drive and incinerate the platters.

 

It comes down to the fact that if a company is storing sensitive data, particularly that of customer they have a duty (perhaps legally - I don't know) to protect that data. It doesn't matter if a quick format will do the job in most cases, if there is still a reasonable chance of recovering the data thats not good enough. If it is 'one of Europe's largest financial services groups' then it must be a slip up, I can't believe that they wouldn't have a system in place when dealing with sensitive data.

 

wiping all data

doesnt Norton have one of these programs that overwrite all data to delete a file...?

 

I know Norton AntiVirus Pro 2004 has a tool that does 2 different types of wipe:

- Fast Wipe - Write a chosen hex value once.

- Government Wipe (DoD 5220.22-M) - Pass 1: Write hex value 0x00, Pass 2: Write hex value 0xFF, Pass 3: Write a chosen hex value, Verify.

You can also set it to repeat the wipe a number of times.

There are many programs that wipe stuff, some even more so than this.

 

I prefer my manual formatting techniques.

Temporary Manual Format:
·Tools Needed: 1 Magnet
·Proceedure: Lift drive with magnet and slide magnet in rotating motion around the drive. Try to get every part of the magnet touching each part of the hard drive at least once from every possible angle.*

Permanent Manual Format (good for those corporate drives you want to trash):
·Tools Needed:
Pure Rust
Aluminum Filings
Magnesium Ribbon
·Proceedure: Mix rust and aluminum properly (like I'm going to tell you how here!? PM me ), cover drive in mixture. Insert magnesium ribbon. Light with torch.*~

*These methods may void your drive's warrantee.
~This method may void your body's warrantee.

I am not responsible for anyone's stupidity but my own.

 

Somebody correct me if i'm wrong but i think the data protection act covers this kind of thing so yes its illegal for them to pass on infomation without getting the consent of the owners. Think i learnt something about this in AS Computing last year .

 

then there's the 'nix way of doing it

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda0

repeat about 3-5 times and the data ain't there anymore

 

Sanitising a disk is all very well if it's your disk and you want to get rid of it (e.g. when a company upgrades its servers), but the danger is when one of your staff leaves a laptop crammed with sensitive data in the back of a cab after a night on the piss or puts it on the floor while buying a train ticket, - linky. A quick BBC news online search for "taxi laptop" reveals this story, along with a story that 600 MoD laptops have been lost or stolen in the last 5 years, and that "One in 17 key public sector workers, like government or defence officials, say they have either lost theirs or had them stolen".

All sensitive data should be kept only on password protected systems running secure file systems (e.g. NTFS - not FATxx) with native strong encryption.

And anyone who writes down the secure password deserves to be raped by a mad goat. Seriously, though, if I were a company boss and I caught someone compromising the security of data by writing down their password, I'd sack them on the spot. It's just plain irresponsible.

 

Gutmann Method

37 passes, specifically designed to Remove ALL Data form a hard drive. More thorough than what the Department of Justice in america uses.

 

I still vote the Thermite method

And it seems to me that the absolute safest way would be to just keep the bloody things. It used to be illegal to trash them anyway. An extra couple G here and there wouldn't hurt...

 

ah good ole thermite