Patient info ends up on eBay The Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust is trying to find out how one of its computers full of confidential medical information was sold on eBay. Disposal of the DGoH's computers is carried out under contract to Siemens Medical Solutions, as part of a PFI agreement. Computer Disposals has a sub-contract with Siemens to …
Why aren't they just destroyed? The value of an obsolete hard disk is so low that it might even be cheaper to send it to a recycling facility instead of attempting to re-use it. Siemens even runs facilities that dismantle electronic devices for recycling so it should be easy.
This proves again that private industry is again more interested in lining its pockets than doing a job well; these wretched profiteers are ripping off the taxpayer whilst delivering third rate service and proving once again the miricle of private industry to be absolute bullshit. Doubles all round!
When I was working for a defence contractor as an apprentice, I was given the task of wiping hard drives for release into the public domain (donation to schools mostly).
I was told I had run a bespoke application over the top, which wrote to each bit and then erased it, and then to format each drive no less than 9 times each.
Maybe a bit excessive, but they wanted no data in the public domain.
when I worked for intel they ran a program the low level formatted the drive, , formatted the drive. then filled the entire drive. Once it did that it formatted the drive , filled the drive up again then start low level formatting it again This process repeated it self 12 times. I was told yo could not getting anything from that drive once its was nuked .
A while back (I would say it was two years ago), C4 News ran a similar story about being reconditioned PCs and hard drives, which had previously been used by a variety of institutions, such as banks, and still containing sensitive information. It seemed more than a few people were hoping that the buyers would do the honest thing and wipe the disks themselves.
One of my mates who works in the IT department of one of the larger UK colleges say they physically destroy unneeded hard drives to be on the safe side....
Is to destroy the magnetic layer : i.e : melt the platters., sandblast the magnetic layer , degauss them, or scratch it with a box cutter ( no head will survive contacting those bumps. )
formatting doesnt do anything with the data. All that a format process does is verify that it can find all servo wedges and read all TIN blocks after the servoburst.
you can format a drive end prior to reaching 100 % power it down, then power it back up ( at 100% the FAT or NTFS or whatever filesystem root table is rewritten so its just a tad harder to find the files ): all the bits are still there.
you can not low-level a drive. only drive manufacturers can do this using a drive formatter. this involves first writing a special sync track on the outer rim of the drive, and then controlling the headstack and start writing the servobursts. they position an extra head through a hole on the side or botto of the drive to read this sync track. Since the platters are really empty there is no way for a drive to find anything. thats what the synctrack does. it tells the machine exactly where the platters are in the revolution cycle.
the harddisk can not do this by itself. the firmware in the drive does not have these algorithms on board. ( nor does it have the extra head )
the only drives that you could low level are the drives based on a stepper motor. there was no tracking mechanism on those drives. every step of the motor was a track. And those went away long before IDE drives came along ...
the best option to do this yourself is to format the drive with a different filesystem then what you were still using the drive. (this ensures that sparse files which may habe been stored in the root tables ( NTFS does that. ) also get killed off.) and then overwriting it multiple times with PRBS patterns. ( you cant use pure random patterns since the possibility exists that a block does not get overwritten at all. if the random data were to match the data stored on the drive ( a million monkeys with a million typewriter syndrome ). the PRBS is random but knows what the previous pass did so it makes sure that during the run every bit has been flipped at least a number number of times and that there is dispersion between the number of times between bits.
Simply writing zero's to the drive in one pass will likely prevent all recovery efforts that don't involve dismantling the drive in a clean room environment and scanning it with special equipment.
The default setting on most utilities is to use several patterns in three or more passes. Nothing can be recovered after that.
The shortfall is trusting employee's to do that rather than just format the drive, which erases the file system but none of the actual files.
BTW Formating to a different files system would only protect against the most basic recovery efforts (simply using a partition utility to undelete the partition), any proper recovery program will ignore the new file system and find all the files anyway.
They probably need a utility that creates a digitally signed log file that includes the drives serial number.
Then people tasked with full erasure can't cut any corners.
Fantastic - the company I work for is a contractor for the Dudley Hospitals group, and we've had to jump through hoops just to use some 'spare' cat5 cabling between some offices thanks to Siemens. And thats a good thing if its protecting personal medical data. But to then find that whilst they're spending many hours blocking the airbricks, they've actually gone and left the front door open for someone to read the post is a little bit irritating to say the least.
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