"Margaret Chesler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> [...]
> As to crushing the drive with a hammer, even that may not be the ultimate
solution. According to Bob Starrett:
>
> "Recently a man was convicted of murder, partly on
> the basis of information contained on a floppy
> diskette that he thought he had destroyed by cutting
> it to pieces with a scissors and crumpling it up. The FBI
> was able, through a rather elaborate process, to reassemble
> that disk and retrieve the incriminating information from it."
> (Source: http://www.roxio.com/en/support/discs/destroydiscs.html)
>
> So if companies go with the hammer approach, they should probably entomb
the drive in cement as well.
Although not everyone has the resources of the FBI, that only underscores
the problem. A business is going to be hesitant to spend the time wiping
drives. Perhaps burning or entombment is required, but donation becomes less
likely.
> CNET Download.com lists several file-wiping utilities at this URL:
We recommend such utilities for re-use of systems. They are horribly slow to
use though.
> [...]
> I wonder if using such utilities on hard drives would still be considered
less cost-effective than hammering,
> especially if some enterprising soul is able to reconstruct data from a
bashed drive, forcing the company
> to verify that bashing truly renders the data unretrievable.
I expect bashing will always be the "to be sure" measure. Had the murderer
been a bit more thorough, he might have gotten away with it.
> BTW, I was actually referring to a rare earth magnet, not the simple
ceramic type one might use to affix
> papers to their refrigerator. But you do have a point in that it would
still take time to verify that the contents
> of the drive had been completely wiped, even though I have never heard of
any data being recovered from
> a drive that has been well drenched in the field of a rare earth magnet.
I used to use the driver magnets from a large set of Cerwin Vega audio
speakers for bulk erasing data cartridges when they refused to format. :)
The problem is more that it would be to easy to miss important data. Well,
that plus having that nasty magnet lying around.
The need is for the intermediary to do things like guarantee that they will
degauss (assuming it can be done without destroying the drive), wipe or
other measures to guarantee the state of the drives, or otherwise facilitate
this measure. Some organizations may allow employees to do it as volunteer
work. Others may work with the local Linux user's group. Others may even be
willing to do it at their own cost. But it's something that has to be
considered. Our problems was that the client was doing NOTHING, thereby
putting themselves at risk.
- Bob
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