Not-So-Clean Hard Drives For Sale 436
Saeed al-Sahaf writes "The Register is running a story about a security consulting company that as part of a study bought hard drives and laptops on eBay, and then was able to recover highly sensitive data including customer databases, financial information, payroll records, personnel details, login codes, and admin passwords for their secure Intranet site. This is a bit scary considering all of these drives were supposedly formatted and sold for surplus by major companies (although few of us actually use the multiple formatting standards of the DoD). Looks like it's hardly necessary for crooks to get at your private information, although I sure industrial espionage spooks have probably done this for awhile." Shades of the recent post about recovering sensitive contents from swap partitions.
Oh no... (Score:5, Funny)
To whoever bought my old hard drive on eBay, those pictures were all for research purposes only.
Sincerely
Peter Townshend
Re:Oh no... (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW, try doing a data recovery on some of the little flash drives that get given out as promos. A few I've seen look like they've been used by the sales staff, before being given out to clients
Re:Oh no... (Score:5, Funny)
After the 4th out of 5 harddrive I was scanning had horse porn I just figured it'd be better to not look anymore.
Re:Oh no... (Score:3, Funny)
Um... (Score:5, Funny)
Horses don't normally wear clothes, you know.
Re:Um... (Score:5, Funny)
Horses don't normally wear clothes, you know.
You are so wrong [lusitano.co.uk]!
Re:Oh no... (Score:5, Funny)
After the 4th out of 5 harddrive I was scanning had horse porn I just figured it'd be better to not look anymore.
I remember my first laptop, a 386sx with vga b&w screen. It was so spiffy I wanted some pictures to show it off, any pictures would do. This was the late 1980s and the only gifs you could find on local BBSs were porn. So I got some porn. In dennies I was asked if my computer could display pictures. I said "Sure here's an image of a woman having sex with a horse". The waitress was so impressed, the quality, the detail, yet was somewhat disusted. So not to apear sexist, I showed here another one "here's a picture of a man having sex with a horse". She asked me if I had some pictures without horses, I had to say "No, the only pictures you can get for computers are of people and horses having sex".
Re:Oh no... (Score:3, Funny)
Hard dives. (Score:4, Funny)
Active KillDisk (Score:3, Informative)
Its worth its weight in gold.
Eraser (GPL) (Score:5, Informative)
That is only gratis software, so you really don't know how well it works, if at all.
A better choice is Eraser, it is GPL [gnu.org]ed.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/ [sourceforge.net]
You can also make a nuke boot disk with this program that automatically starts erasing everything upon start up. Don't forget to clearly label it ;).
Re:Eraser (GPL) (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Eraser (GPL) (Score:3, Informative)
Being GPL isn't much of a help here either. Whether you can truly erase a drive depends on so many low level (read: inside the drive 'black box') factors, that it's impossible to be 100% certain the disk is clean.
Physical destruction of the disk is the best and only certain way of ensuring that critical data isn't still readable. Degaussing takes second place.
Re:Eraser (GPL) (Score:4, Insightful)
Its not about the licesne you dolt, its about source code visibility. If you can't see the source code, then you can't easily sure what the program is really doing.
Re:Active KillDisk (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Active KillDisk (Score:3, Informative)
For this reason it is effectively impossible to sanitise storage locations by simple overwriting them, no matter how many overwrite passes are made or what data patterns are written.
Re:Active KillDisk (Score:5, Informative)
Data overwritten once or twice may be recovered by subtracting what is expected to be read from a storage location from what is actually read. Data which is overwritten an arbitrarily large number of times can still be recovered provided that the new data isn't written to the same location as the original data (for magnetic media), or that the recovery attempt is carried out fairly soon after the new data was written (for RAM). For this reason it is effectively impossible to sanitise storage locations by simple overwriting them, no matter how many overwrite passes are made or what data patterns are written. However by using the relatively simple methods presented in this paper the task of an attacker can be made significantly more difficult, if not prohibitively expensive.
So it sounds like if you are overwriting your data in the exact same physical location which it currently exists, it should be possible to make the original copy unrecoverable given enough overwrites.
Re:Active KillDisk (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Active KillDisk (Score:3, Insightful)
basically, the theory is that if the heads are slightly off, the drive may still work fine, but the data is written slightly off as well, such that traces of the data exist due to slight magnetic remnants. this theory thus is that drives must be destroyed to be secure.
most high security orgs feel the same way - IIRC, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police put out a doc for
Sounds familier (Score:2)
Learn something!! not scaremongering!! (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is to learn something from it.
Re:Learn something!! not scaremongering!! (Score:2)
Actually removing the contents of a fiel is what you need, and tools for that have been around for at least the last 20 years that I remember.
So no, theres little to learn there, wha they seem to want to point out here is that security has a lot more to do with how you think and
Re:Learn something!! not scaremongering!! (Score:5, Insightful)
From the wording of the story, it's not clear that the drives were erased at all -- it says 'all of had "supposedly" been "wiped-clean" or "re-formatted"', which makes it seem likely to me that this is not some high tech recovery from wiped space, but simply taking advantage of negligence. Other stories have highlighted this as a consequence of outsourcing of disposal to companies which are supposed to do this before selling them, but neglect to. A company shouldn't let a disk off the premises without wiping it themselves -- it's a trivial process, as many other posts are detailing their favorite methids I won't bother. The sad consequence is that many potentially useful machines will now be destroyed out of paranoia and cosntribute to computer waste
Re:be careful who you hire (Score:3)
A Windows crash screwed up my partition table, eventually I found Testdisk [cgsecurity.org], a marvellous free utility that analysed the disk for an hour then rewrote the tables, and brought it back to life with my data (unbacked) all there.
Re:Learn something!! not scaremongering!! (Score:3, Informative)
Most likely it's very simple. The disks they recovered info from were not overwritten and the disks they couldn't recover information from were overwritten. A format that operates mostly in read-mode will leave most of the information intact on the disk. I have even FDISK'd, messed around with varying parti
If you're really paranoid about your data... (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather than make a few tens of dollars selling an old drive, take it apart, and burn the platters until they're nothing more than dust. Problem solved.
Re:If you're really paranoid about your data... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If you're really paranoid about your data... (Score:5, Funny)
Damn. You're the guy responsible for every Adventure game ever.
Now I gotta go collect this guy's harddrive and reassemble it so I can get the Master Sword.
Re:If you're really paranoid about your data... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Burn the platters?" What, do you live in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber? They're aluminum, aren't they?
I was looking for a link for oxygen chambers and happened across this link on underwater blast injuries [scuba-doc.com]. I figured it was interesting and it kind of goes with the typo in the title.... At least, it seems more interesting than a second article that says "there's data o
Skeet shooting. (Score:3, Funny)
Geek hint: Do this in that mythical place called "outide", unless you have a very understanding landlord/mother.
"DoD-levels of formatting" is themite (Score:4, Informative)
That said, for most purposes programs like Eraser will make data recovery so expensive and ineffective that for the data most of us have, nobody will bother. In fact, that's probably true even of less effective measures such as "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb".
This is why... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is why... (Score:3, Interesting)
Though is this case I think we're dealing with corporate upgrade cycle here. Usually the corporation sells off a bunch of drive in bulk to cut the cost of the upgrade or company hired to do the upgrade takes the old drives and re-sells them to garner a few extra $$.
Mycr
Re:This is why... (Score:3, Interesting)
Heck, I've got every harddrive I've ever owned here, even the ones that died. Someday I'll get around to making clocks from them or maybe speakers like I saw here a long while back. Recently I had a computer start acting strange on IDE (but with an adapter, the drive worked fine on SATA in that machine) so I went through ALL the old IDE drives until I found one that actually still worked... 650MB IDE drive from Conner, if I recall correctly. That drive
Slashdot Spellchecker.... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Slashdot Spellchecker.... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Slashdot Spellchecker.... (Score:4, Funny)
not a joke (Score:2, Funny)
Step2: ???
Step3: profit
let's discuss Step2
Similar to MIT students in Jan 2003 (Score:5, Interesting)
Simplified summary of both: buy some hard drives on eBay and you could end up with some cool data!
Re:Similar to MIT students in Jan 2003 (Score:5, Funny)
buy some hard drives on eBay and you could end up with some cool data!
Of course you are more likely to buy some hard drives on eBay and end up with the entire history of some guy's girlfriend's medical problems in old e-mails, a small collection of old cached Slashdot pages, and some rather naff Flash animations.
old computer (Score:2, Funny)
I'm going to rip a line from Schnier(sp?) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm going to rip a line from Schnier(sp?) (Score:2)
Wipe the drive and sell it (at next to nothing) to your employees. Depending on your company and the number of geeks in it - there will always be someone who wants a 4-5 year old laptop for a project. Besides, no shipping charges. In the worst case, your employees get access to the data (most of them have it anyways). You do trust your employees, right?
DUPE! (Score:5, Informative)
Circa September 2003 [slashdot.org]... nine months ago.
Circa January 2003 [slashdot.org]... eighteen months ago.
Then again, we've been talking about this problem for a year and a half, yet there still are people stupid enough to be selling HDs with readable data that should be kept secret on them without doing DOD-level formatting.
TRIP! (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
What? Troll, am I? Well, it's slashdot. Someone had to poke fun at SCO. Sue me.
I know I'm OK! (Score:3, Funny)
Is it worth the money (Score:2, Insightful)
My organization disassembles the drives and incinerates the platters. I'd like to see anyone get data from them.
Deconstructing a HD... (Score:5, Informative)
- Open the hd. Save the cool looking screws.
- Turn the platters into coasters.
- Just make sure you don't hurt yourself when playing with the magnets.
Why SlashDot keeps posting dupes! (Score:5, Funny)
May or may not help... (Score:4, Informative)
Use the shred utility, with a good number of iterations (25 sounds good). Go to the root directory and issue
shred -n 25 -u -v *
Then when you're done with that, low level format the drive using a disk utility such as the ones that come with Maxtors and Western Digital drives.
Re:May or may not help... (Score:3, Informative)
Not unlike the findings of another article (Score:2)
Hard drive erasing HOWTO (Score:5, Informative)
The Secure harddisk eraser is a Linux boot floppy that overwrites your drive with random bits. Comes in a 3-pass and a 35-pass version. Insert, boot, wait for beep. Free as in GPL.
Re:Can someone explain why 35 times? (Score:3, Informative)
But if you're concerned about someone ripping the drive open and using electron microscopy to work out the alignment of the molecules (and from that, the data they store), then theory (and experiments?) shows that the multiple-pattern-wipe technique is sufficient to guarantee data is destroyed.
For most data, therefore,
shred floppy (Score:4, Interesting)
Works like a charm. And it has various levels of paranoia to choose from.
A Large Multinational Bank had this problem (Score:5, Interesting)
So I had their FedEx programs, account numbers, their in-house banking programs and a sweet little windows 3.1 interface. Needless to say I disposed of the information properly. But I told my brother in law. He said "Oh, really" and just forgot about it. Go figure.
It is far too easy for those who would take advantage of sensitive information to exploit it for their own gain. They are quite fortunate someone like me got their hard drives and not someone bent on robbing them blind.
Re:A Large Multinational Bank had this problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A Large Multinational Bank had this problem (Score:5, Funny)
The Real Canadian Method (Score:5)
- remove drive from machine,
- remove screws from drive,
- split HD case open,
- smash to bits.
No data leaks. Really! Kind of brings a tear to the eye of the guy with the screwdriver and hammer though.We break them! (Score:4, Interesting)
PowerPoint presentations? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, that's BS. Nothing even remotely important gets put into a PowerPoint presentation.
I know, I've been to meetings. God, have I been to meetings...
Little bits of metal == the only way to go (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps there's money to be made in performing this sort of destructive service for banks and other entities handling sensitive customer information.
Re:Little bits of metal == the only way to go (Score:5, Funny)
*excuse the pun, but it's kind of fitting. but please note the sarcasm.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Darik's Boot 'n' nuke (Score:3, Funny)
In a police environement (Score:5, Interesting)
It'd figure other industries would do the same. Heck it's your business, your data, your life (well, only of part of it hopefully!) you have on these disk. Why bother with selling them? To get 20$ 50$? The way i see it, selling hard drives is equal to selling random filing cabinet without making sure they're empty.
slightly off-topic side note: :-D
/slightly off-topic side note
Some officers here are so tight about security: One of out tech went out to replace a fried power supply. When walking out with the roasted one, one guy asked: "Hey couldn't there be data on there?" the tech answered a polite "no" with a smile. The guy handed him a pair of cutter and said:"Well why don't you cut-off those wires just to make sure" !!
Government (Score:3, Interesting)
Something like this usually works (Score:3, Interesting)
for(( i=1; $i20; $((i++)) )); do
# Do something to seed random number generator, probably involving the clock
echo Erasing cycle $i;
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda;
done
The chinese army... (Score:5, Interesting)
They tried hotkey combinations, which would trigger a script to delete the hard drive, but they were either too complex to remember, or too easy to accidentally hit.
In the end, they painted a big red 'X' on the underside of the laptop right where the hard drive sits, and instructed the operator "point gun here".
ATA/SATA drives can Secure Erase by themselves! (Score:5, Interesting)
We just need to figure out how to get Linux/*BSD/*NIX/Apple/Microsoft to make this an option at the OS or fdisk/format/Disk Utility/Volume Manager utility level so we can all use it easily.
What's all this rubbish about opening up a HD... (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a 40GB hard disk that I'd paid a bit more for at the time because it was from a large reliable company (which I won't name) and had decent performance. It had a short life - maybe 2 years before it started playing up. Within 3 or 4 it was unusable even as a backup disk.
I took a great deal of pleasure in "opening it up" with a hammer. The screws were star shaped (torque screws??). The platter actually shatterred into dust and some larger shards. Don't know how safe it was doing this in my backyard, but it was a lot of fun. (Remember the scene from Office Space where they smashed the printer into tiny bits). Good therapy.
Hard drives aren't the only media like this... (Score:3, Informative)
About 1 out of 10 tapes I buy has stuff like source code for commercial closed source applications, confidential customer data, etc.
It's scary how lax people are with this shit.
interesting question (Score:4, Interesting)
You can usually get some fairly random data from
A "1 that used to be a 0, and before that a 1" and a "1 that used to be a 0, and before that a 0" are almost certainly indistinguible. One write ago you might be able to recover, but two writes ago you haven't got much chance. Perhaps if you extracted the platters, you might be able to find some remnants of data on them
Once the data is as close to unrecoverable as won't make much difference, any extra effort you make is wasted. Sure, there are going to be one or two gems out there; but most people's data isn't that valuable, or can be had elsewhere for less effort. Think about it: Names and addresses are published in phone books and electoral registers. Identity numbers / SSNs are not secret. Nor are bank account numbers -- they're on every cheque you write. Credit card numbers are only valid for two years. Medical records of strangers are an interesting read, but not terrifically useful for anything interesting. If you're utterly paranoid, it might be worth doing partial random writes before storing any data on a new drive -- so if someone really can determine the first thing ever written to the drive, it would be nonsense. "Underwrite" each sector a random number of times, of course. Of course, if you have an encrypted file system, only the encryption key need be erased securely.
So, having applied the laws of physics and seen that getting rid of data isn't that hard (and could be implemented almost trivially at the OS level; but not being able to recover data might conceivably be worse than being able to recover it, what with everyone getting used to the idea of a magical 'undo' button), let's turn the question around and look at it from the other side:
Who gets fat on persuading people that they need to physically destroy used hard disk drives? And why? Let's see
Anyway, if recovering overwritten data really worked -- or even only half-worked -- someone would, by now, have tried to use it for a "drive space expander" utility. The kind of thing that would probably be advertised by SPAM.
Misconception (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Low level it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Low level it. (Score:5, Interesting)
For others who plan on trying this out: Don't worry, dumpsters for your average company is clean with no gross shit in it. Oh, and regarding the police.. Wear nasty looking clothes.. I mean, really look like a dirt bag. If you go looking like geekboy from a middle income family, you'll get a trespassing charge against you. If you look like a rat, they will leave you alone. We only had a couple of run-ins with the cops and tenants. They all went pretty well, as we said we were looking for things to sell at the pawn shop.
The key, I have found, when performing a social hack is to always pretend like you recognize authority. Cops will quit caring about pointing out your trespass, real fast, when they manage to get a self-esteem boost by picking on a poor person. The little guilty voice in the back of their head will say "Leave the poor slob alone.. AlooOoone!"
Warning: This will not work if you park your new Volvo next to the dumpster. Park around other cars, if there are any, and be prepared to abandon your vehicle a few hours if you are told to leave by the cops. Oh, and get some strong fabric laundry bags to carry your loot.
Even the East German STASI ... (Score:5, Interesting)
So the lesson is, after you whipe your disk, DON'T FORGET THE BACKUP MEDIA!
Re:Low level it. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Low level it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Phone handsets or doorknobs are generally *far* worse from a sanitary perspective than just about anything else. All the communicable respiratory diseases have been nicely cultured on the doorknobs by people sneezing on their hands and then operating the knob.
Heck, your ancestors survived tromping around in the mud, barefoot, getting stabbed, clawed, bitten, stung, and so forth. You have an immune system and regenerative abilities that are awfully tough to muck with. Now, *cars*...*cars* are scary. Not many people die each year from scorpion bites, but tens of thousands of people die each year from auto accidents in the United States. And you probably have a road out right in front of your house!
As Neal Stephenson put it -- you're a stupendeous badass. You come from a long line of stupendous badasses. Anything that wasn't a stupendous badass is now dead.
Re:Low level it. (Score:3, Funny)
No kidding! I once read about the population of an entire planet that was killed off due to a particularly nasty virus contracted from a filthy telephone, embarassingly after they had sent off all of their telephone sanitizers to colonize a new world.
You can't make stuff like that up...
Re:Low level it. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Low level it. (Score:5, Informative)
Re-formatting ata hard drives at a truly low level can mess the disk organisation in ways that seriously degrade performance.
If your referring to a 'full' format with does more than the 'quick' format that mearly marks the drive as empty, well it's easy, and of very little use in this case.
Simply writing zeros to every location on the hard drive that stores data doesn't completely erase the data. That is the magnetic field of the bits are not set at exactly '0'. Slight variations in the magnetic material, write head field strength, and positioning all contribute to increase the odds of data being recoverable.
One way to improve your odds is to repeatedly write a series of 1's and 0's to a location to help average out these variables as well as use the hysteresis(sp?) effect to 'degause' the location, this is what 'shredder' programs do (the ones that aren't crap).
Some programs even go so far as to not simply write 11111111 then 00000000 over and over to the same byte, but to use other patterns so that the fields of niegboring bits add to the deguas effect in destroying the data.
At one time (and probably to this day) the US DOD specs used to require a certain number of passes of 0 and 1 bits followed by the writing of a specific bit pattern before a hard drive was considered to have been properly erased.
And yes each pass does put a little wear and tear on the drive, not enough to worry about unless your 'shredding' the drive quite a few times, but still worth noting.
The number of passes used and what if any special patterns are used determine the amount of effort it would take to recover the data, kind of like key length in cryptography. Adjust paranoi settings apropriately. (note: the anology is imperfect as hell, 1024 might be a mediocre key length, but thats enough shred passes to noticeably shorten drive lifespan.)
Mycroft
Re:Low level it. (Score:5, Informative)
Another easy alternative -- KNOPPIX (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Low level it. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Low level it. (Score:3, Interesting)
I find it hard to believe the US DoD is this lax on security. I used to work for the Canadian government, and we had to hammer a nail through the drive a certain number of times "according to the specs" to consider it properly erased.
Re:Low level it. (Score:5, Informative)
what we do (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:what we do (Score:4, Informative)
For disks sued for defence at level secret and above we used to scrub it, place it on a runway and run over it with a tank!! Then dispose of it in a secure landfill site.
Re:what we do (Score:3, Insightful)
for the more paranoid, simply increase the number of holes.
a power drill's a lot cheaper than a degauser, and *every* techie can find a use for a powerful cordless drill hanging on the wall, even if it's only for threatening lusers.
DOD 5220.22-M, the RCMP guidelines, and friends (Score:3, Informative)
Pages 14 and 15 note methods "a, b, d, and m" sanitizing fixed drives, and continues:
Note this applies to DOD contractors, and other rules probably apply to DOD, military, and the CIA/NSA/NRO/etc intelligence community.
The obvious implication is that t
Re:Low level it. (Score:5, Informative)
For this reason, I believe the DOD reccomends writing random data to the disk 7 times, to guarentee that it is destroyed.
Remember, however, that any overwriting makes it impossible to recover data except by special means far beyond that of a normal file recovery program. Tools that recover data after it has been overwritten are not easy to make, and I'm not even sure that they would run on computer hardware. It's possible that such recovery would require special ATA firmware, or even replacing the hard disk firmware.
I'm not an expert, but that is what I've been able to grok from casual reading on the subjectt.
A use for all those pictures full of pink bits. (Score:5, Funny)
(1) wipe the drive with ones
(2) wipe the drive with zeroes
(3) fill the drive with p0rn
(4) wipe the drive with ones
(5) wipe the drive with zeroes
When they get to the p0rn layer, the chances are good that they will stop looking further. Once they find all those goodies you planted at step 3, they won't look for all those financial records.
Re:Low level it. (Score:3, Informative)
The use of specific patterns, especially alternating 1's and 0's, is to take advantage of known effects such as degausing. There is also the matter of modern hard-drives and ecc data that a poster below kindly pointed out. My last dealings with such data-erasure techniques was a few (8-10?) years ago. My appologies for not pointing out that my info might be a tad dated.
Mycroft
` man shred ` for more info (Score:3, Insightful)
dd if=/dev/urand of=/dev/hdc
done
( /dev/hdc presumes that the soon-to-be disposed of drive is the primary drive on the secondary IDE controller. Adjust as appropriate -- eg: /dev/hda to sanitize the dos C: drive).
For those of you who don't have Linux, a copy of Knoppix will do fine, as will using the first install disk of most distribut
What kind of bullshit story is that? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:pr0n (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Just Destroy The fucking Things! (Score:5, Insightful)
Waste = bad.
-- n
Re:Just Destroy The fucking Things! (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean the same type of company that would lay off an employee and hire the employee back as a contractor at 1.5x's the employees original salary to avoid paying health insurance premiums and so they don't have to pay as much to the employees pension???
*choke* Bwahahahahahahaha