eBay hard drive spills out governor's campaign documents From the files of IT bloopers comes this cautionary tale: a California man stumbled upon a stash of confidential data belonging to the Arkansas Democratic Party after its computer consultant accidentally sold a hard drive containing the material on eBay. Bill Ries-Knight, also an IT consultant, purchased the 120 GB Seagate …
How hard is it to format a drive before selling it? I know data can be recovered easily with simple utilities (done it myself many times), but just formatting it is enough to discourage 99.9% of would-be information thieves. Or use one of the many available freeware data-wipe utils. Or even download a utility from the manufacturer's website--most of these have the ability to write all 0s to the drive. Again, are people really that ignorant?
An IT bloke that doesn't know about PGP? Sheesh, 60 bucks and you get full HD crypto. Or go for the free version and wipe the stuff.
Hell, even badblocks has the "aggressive pattern check" that basically does a datawipe on the thing! There's no excuse on this blooper, not even "my wife sold my sooper sekrit harddrive".
Of course, you can wipe data the hard way: lotsa magnets, rubber mallets or a hammer. Do it the BOFH way ;)
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My Mum wanted to dump an old (very old, 486/W95) system. She asked me to destroy the hard drive, since at a massive 340Mbytes it wasn't ever going to be worth reusing.
I learned something interesting. Even with a drive that old, it is *really* difficult to take a hammer & chisel to it :)
BOFH or not, after years of always taking backups to protect data it just goes against the grain to assault a disk with a hammer! As for that little pinging 'chime' when the chisel hit the platter... ouch, that hurts.
It is when an archer releases an arrow and is part of the origin of a 'fast and loose' person. When a leader shouts Fast all archers must hold still but an untrustworthy archer might loose a nocked arrow in error hence fast and loose.
Bugs me as well when people type loose instead of lose. :<
Re: "Of course, you can wipe data the hard way: lotsa magnets, rubber mallets or a hammer. Do it the BOFH way ;)"
Just for fun, on a slow day at work, I took a failing laptop hard drive & decided to expose it to the effects of a bulk tape eraser/degaussing coil. The coil was strong enough to actually violently lift the drive, slamming it into the coil with a loud clank, then emitting an angry buzz until I released it. I did this several times, from several different angles, finding it amusing. Then I decided to try to read the drive. To my astonishment, I could read all of the data still! Running chkdsk on the drive only turned up very minor errors after all of this. So I'd say the "lotsa magnets" approach is out... the hammer still works pretty well tho.
this man should seek other employment. he does not belong in IT.
since he had functional hardware, there's an easy solution.
a free utility, provided as image download, can boot from floppy, CD, DVD, USB, and flash, provides various levels of DoD-level secure wipe:
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
"...after years of always taking backups to protect data it just goes against the grain to assault a disk with a hammer!..."
Huh. I never find it difficult at all. Quite theraputic, really. Mind you, I don't usually stoop to the chisel level - I use a 16lbm splitting maul, which usually goes straight through the drive, platters and all, on the first go. Once I used a 20-ton hydraulic press with a punch. That was a real hoot, but too slow for day to day destruction.
I live in Kansas we don't need any extra help looking stupid
Apparently there was absolutely nothing wrong with the drive
so what was the fools problem I assume it was formatted for
XP just shove it in your PC du jour and install Linux over it and
no one will ever find your old files. Seagates are tough to break
I killed a Gateway with one once dropped it the full tower length
into the bottom graphics card and that was that though I still
have the drive three years later and it still works fine.
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