Get Smart about Business Spending
- Related Stories
-
Security breach laws become state's rights issue
April 13, 2005 -
HP promotes smaller server drives
March 17, 2005 -
Intel rethinking the living room PC
March 3, 2005 -
Fujitsu making 120GB laptop drive
February 28, 2005 -
eBay forms coalition to cut e-waste
January 6, 2005
There are a number of options for cleansing the drives of unwanted computers, from special wiping software to destruction services to manufacturers' recycling programs. But what many PC owners don't realize, experts say, is that these methods are often not enough.
"For people who want to sell or donate a computer, who are trying to protect their checkbook or medical info, you can expect to protect yourself against all but the most sophisticated attacks with wiping," said Stephen Lawton, the director of marketing at Acronis, a maker of wiping tools, backup and recovery software. "But you have to use the software the right way."
What's new:
It can be tougher to clean data off a discarded hard drive than many people realize, experts say.
Bottom line:
Sensitive data could be left on donated or sold PCs. The only way to erase drives is to use wiping software plus material destruction.
"Even the people who destroy disks will tell you (that) unless you do that correctly, there are always people who can get the data off," he added.
That means that passwords, logins and other personal information could still be lurking on machines that have supposedly been cleaned--a risk that strikes a chord amid reports of laptop thefts exposing sensitive information on thousands of Americans.
Two weeks ago, the National Association for Information Destruction announced that it could not endorse the use of wiping applications alone for deleting data from hard drives. Bob Johnson, executive director at NAID, said the data-destruction industry group would like to be able to recommend the tools, but that tests had left reason to doubt the wiping products.
"Our position, ultimately, was that we will only give our approval to physical destruction of the hard drive," Johnson said. "We know that unless that is done a certain way, even that can be an ineffective approach."
Johnson also distrusts the ability of companies offering mass computer wiping services to have sufficient methods of testing to see if data exists on the drives even after their processes have been run.
Remains of the data
There are signs that people are not aware of the risk from discarded drives. Last year, German encryption technology specialist Pointsec tested hard drives bought on eBay to see if they still carried data and discovered that seven out of every 10 devices it tested still bore readable information.
That study followed similar research published in 2003 by graduate students Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat, who found that only 12 of the 129 working computer hard drives they bought in secondhand stores and on auction site eBay had been adequately cleansed of sensitive data from their previous owners.
"You have all kinds of data being stored in the hard drive, in the Web browser and in application files, and these are all affected by the same problem--you delete something on the computer, but it doesn't really ever get deleted completely," said Garfinkel, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"You have to distinguish between deleting occasional files and truly wiping a machine clean," he added. "There's really a significant difference."
The first step for many people would be a low-level reformatting of the operating system on their PC, even though doing that with Microsoft's Windows or Apple Computer's Mac OS operating systems won't destroy data completely, experts said.
"What we've seen with a lot of clients is that they think that reformatting a drive gets rid of the data, and that's just not true," said Kathy Ferguson, a business unit manager with IBM's Asset Recovery Solutions Group. "In a typical scenario, that only overwrites partitions, or sectors of data. At the end of the day, you can recover that data readily if you have the right tools."
Wiping software is the obvious next choice. Everyone from security giants such as Symantec to freeware vendors such as MXC Software offers applications meant to help people hide the data they once wanted stored on their computers. Most of these technologies revolve around software meant to overwrite the information on the devices with a random series of numerals.
The difference between people who use wiping software correctly to erase their hard drives and those who do not is most often a
See more CNET content tagged:
encryption technology, expert, hard drive, eBay Inc., operating system
business or the so-called security people are totally paranoid.
A triple wipe will not leave useful informationon the hard drive.
Most utilities can execute a wipe (not a reformat or reparttion).
Just do it three times. Even after just one wipe, it takes an expert
with big software and hardware options to extraxt anything from
the n=hard drive.
Smashing the hard drive, and fracturing the disk(s), will make
data recovery almost impossible. (Hammers are cheap, and you
may already have one.) NItric Acid baths also work but a quite
dangerous.
The average person doesn't have information on his hard drive
that is worth the money and time to recover, if either above
procedures are used.
Now, if you pass on a computer or a hard drive without trying to
eliminate the data in it. you're jsut setting your self up. That;s
true enough, and as reported, a lot of the people don't realize
that just a reformat doesn't work. But just a little bit of effort will
leave 99% of the computer users perfectly safe.
wipe and forget about it.
The part of the story I felt was left out is what it really takes to
recover data from drives. For an unwiped drive, anyone can
undelete the files. For a drive that's been wiped even once it
takes special drivers that will "read between the lines", special
software to piece the bits together, and a lot of time. Not
something that's worth doing for the random chance of finding
the details necessary to drain someone's bank account of a
couple thousand dollars (if you're lucky). For an idea of how
much it costs to do this, check out some of the companies that
recover data that has been accidently erased and see how much
they charge. IIRC wiping three times pretty much eliminates this
type of snooping as a possibility.
Beyond that, you're talking the need for clean rooms to
dismantle the drive, specialized equipment costing hundreds of
thousands of dollars to "map" each platter, specialized software
to reconstruct data, and days to months of work by highly
trained professionals.
It also makes it easer when you go to a new computer, if you put your old hard drive in as a slave on the primary IDE, if you forgot to move a file, it is right there on the /dev/hdb drive.
It is hardly difficult to clean an old disk or computer, there are even effective free tools for it. My personal favorite would be DBAN, http://dban.sourceforge.net/ that allows you to create a bootable floppy or CD, boot from that and then overwrite harddrive content with varying degrees of paranoia employed.
With tools like these available there is no excuse for IT staff etc to allow drives with unerased content to be sold, however.
I don't have any money.
I don't know anybody.
And so consequently, I have nothing to worry about.
It's simple. You should try it.
- Just take apart and open up the drive. This should defeat 99.9% of people.
- Fire.
- Sledgehammer.
- Roll over it with your car.
- Drop it in a river.
I remove the platters, then I take out the rare-earth magnets and have fun with them! Rest goes into the dumpster (or recycled for metals).
if someone wants the PC, then let them get a new drive.
The hard drive is baked in my BARBECUE for an hour.
then taken and placed on the ground where I pound it with my cement hammer, and then I wrap it, and discard it.(after I transfer everything to my new hard drive)...etc..
(Good idea though)
Secure deletion is useful to protect your (and your users') privacy and has to be used in a LEGAL and POLITE way. In Italy, for example, there's a law (DLGS 196/03) which states that secure deletion is mandatory in certain cases.
DBAN is a very good and powerful tool (and free too), but can only eraser entire disks. Some other products (both freeware and shareware) can erase even single files or folders. My personal favorite is Wiperaser.
One even writes about sourcforge. Like my mother is going to go to sourceforge and download programs...!
the trigger!!!!!!
operating system to safely erase documents and directories
through the srm command (http://srm.sourceforge.net) or the
"Secure Empty Trash" Finder menu item.
In its standard form, the feature uses the 35-pass Gutmann
algorithm to erase data.
http://www.apple.com/pro/tips/secureempty.html
Most recently i remove the disk and store in a safe deposit box until i decide the contents are not valuable at which time the storage media will be removed and physically destroyed. What is issue with you people? Just pull out the drive and media. If you have decided to "wipe it" you might as well remove it and physically destroy the media.
Am I missing something or are you opposed to thinking and removing things from the "BOX"
need a hard drive. And a wiped drive can be reformatted and
used again. Of course, by the time you do that, the old drive is
awful small.
I can still remember when people would almost kill to get a 40
MBytte hard drive. Today, I toss 80 GByte hard drives as being
too damn small to be useful.
matter of technical facts, manipulated by companies who want
to sell you their products and services.
I've been recovering data for clients for years - it is extremely
difficult and costly, and only worth it when you know the value
of what you're looking for.
While this is a concern for CIA and celebrities, unless your old
drive says "Property of Paris Hilton" on the case, nobody will try
to recover it if it had been simply formatted prior to disposal - it
is way too much effort to get anything off of it without knowing
what you are even looking for!
If you want to be completely sure, a single pass of 0/1 overwrite
during format is more than enough to be 100% sure nobody can
extract your bookmarks, checkbooks and porn. :)
Shame on CNET for ignorant fearmongering to sell unnecessary
wares !!!
The hard drive scientists/engineers jump out of their hides just to read the written (not overwritten) data, close to theoretical SN ratio limits. If the data is overwritten once, its remains are well below noise (and the new data is not much above noise), so don't even think about recovering it. Gone are times of 1000 tpi/10000 bpi and inter-track gap data (other than on a floppy, which we're not talking about).
Think about 100000 tpi/250000 bpi. There is no hope to recover data overwritten once, even for big guys like NSA.
Sounds like a high-level format done by the OS to place a file system on the drive and check for bad sectors. Low-level formatting is done with a utility obtained from the drive manufacturer and is completely independent of the OS. LL formats takes hours and hours to complete! Neither format method has anything to do with the partition table either.
- Skeletons on your hard drive
- by April 21, 2005 4:30 AM PDT
- Why not keep your hard drives, place them in fire-wire or USB in-closures and save the data like I do. I presently have 5 desktop drives and one laptop drive connected to my system. I use each drive for something different, pictures, downloads, backups, hidden stuff!!
- Reply to this comment
-
Showing 1 of 2 pages (48 Comments)