How &$%^£*&! hard can it be to securely destroy a hard disc????

Plus once an attacker has your details, they can make themselves *far* more convincing when they phone you and say Hello Mr/Mrs/Miss XXXXX, I'm from (high Street bank), we've detected suspiscious acitivity on your bank account number XXYYZZ, we see its a joint account with youe spouse, Mr/mrs XXXX and we see you have a pension plan with Pension provider from the direct debits etc etc......

Interestingly enough, the metal platter did not glow red hot at all.... It just softened and then finally dripped globules into the water.

There was some brief flame flashes as the magnetic layer delaminated from the metal disc.

You need a chemical, brick acid? vinegar? to drown the drives in. That will be quick. (Suggestions for something safe, I could bottle and sell?)

In the US, when they were doing 'cash for clunkers', the engine oil would be replaced with a sodium silicate solution to put the block beyond use.

I see you use Windows*. "They" probably already have your data.

Just joking....

I hit the whole drive pretty hard with a hammer. That should damage the motor etc, but not necessarily the platters. If you smash the PCB, it becomes a major job to source another, so nobody is going to bother.

I actually snip out the address labels from post and parcels and it is then stored in the fire bucket and used to start fires with in the woodburner.... the rest of the packaging then goes into the recycling

All paper correspondence also ends up as firestarter material for the woodburner.

Some papers seme to come with a finish of some description that makes it a challenge to actually light and get burning.... a MAPP blowlamp soon sorts that out :-)

I don't store any personal informaition in my browser.

So what, what's interesting in my E-Mails?

No they're not. I have to tell anyone who pays me money "who you have a

They're encrypted.

... and it *still* won't be worth anyone spending a lot of money searching for information on lots of disks on the offchance they'll find something useful somewhere.

Can anyone show us real evidence that there are people out there searching through old hard disks looking for this sort of data?

Sourcing another PCB is easy, eBay is a good source of failed drives from which you can take teh PCB from as a donor "organ"

I prefer to direct the destructive energy at the platters *themselves*

S.

and this one too.....:

Those kind of drive-by data slurping are fair arguments to *wipe* a HDD. But if it's broken, by definition nobody can read it, which means a miscreant can't read it either. They would have to spend time and money fixing it, which unless you're a high value target is not going to be worth it. If you did any kind of physical dismantling (taking the lid off, unscrewing the platters) that cost goes up by orders of magnitude.

The solution to all of this is full disc encryption. Without the password the disc is full of random noise. If you are concerned about the disc falling into the wrong hands (on a laptop, or at disposal time) then FDE will protect against that. SSDs typically do FDE 'for free' - the raw flash is encrypted, and a 'secure erase' is simply deleting the key from inside the controller.

No angle grinders needed.

Theo

Quite. Those CSI TV progs have a lot to answer for. ;-)

That's not evidence of people actually digging around for old data it's just evidence that it's there and that people don't erase it.

... and memory cards are rather different from hard disks. Even so the paper says that some of the cards were 'faulty' and that they couldn't thus get at the data, this is the case we're dealing with regarding hard disks.

Yes, Windows comes with Bitlocker. I am curious to know what the CPU overhead is for decrypting on the fly the encrypted data on said drive?

If you are concerned about the disc

Is Bitlocker considered to be a FDE?

SSDs typically do FDE 'for free' - the raw flash

Thats interesting to know, why is FDE used on SSDs? I don't see it advertised as a feature on the advertising blurb so it gives one the impression that one needs to deploy FDE....

Deleting the key is not the same thing as securely erasing the key with an overwrite so my question is can the "deleted" key be recovered?

Also SSD's use wear levelling so an overwrite may end up on a physically different location on the flash NAND chips?

If they're using Windows its essentially a certainty.

What is a .pst file?

whenever you create/send or recieve an email and all your email folders all get backed up to a *.pst file.

The idea being that you can export the *.pst file from older/to be scrapped or to be formatted & reinstalled machine.

Then you import the *.pst file a new/reformatted & reinstalled machine so your new set up then has all teh emails and folders etc

Only by Microsoft Outlook (the full-fat Office version, not the Express version)

And nowadays more people probably use a .ost file instead

for Thunderbird the equivalent is a .msf file

"Outlook 2002 and earlier use ANSI (extended ASCII with a codepage) encoding. This format has a maximum size of 2 GB (2^31 bytes) and does not support unicode.

From Outlook 2003 and onward, the new standard format for .pst is Unicode (UTF-16 little-endian), with 64-bit pointers. The limit became 20 GB for Outlook 2003-2007, and increased to 50 GB from Outlook 2010. "

It's an awful kind of storage container. It's possible it holds multiple mailboxes.

libpst - a little too low level maybe

"The default folders within a pst-file for a POP3 account are;

Inbox Drafts Outbox Sent Items Deleted Items Junk Email Search Folders RSS Feeds Calendar Contacts Suggested Contacts (Outlook 2010 only) Tasks Notes Journal "

Paul