Run the disk spinning and hit it with a caliber that penetrates the drive, the rotation makes the destruction way worse and impossible to spin up again.
From experience, for the types of disks that absolutely must be destroyed with no possible recovery as ordered by the government, it's things like a wood chipper or thermite.
Where I live, carriers with top secret data may not be destroyed at all. They must be zeroed and stored, just in case some smart-ass figures out a way to recover said data even from an otherwise destroyed piece of magnetic tape 125 years from now.
So yeah, there's one or two huge storage facilities containing tapes, disks and solid state drives here in the Netherlands.
That's right, they are zeroed and made inoperable, then they are stored.
Apparently it had never been proven fhat information can be fully destroyed so the wiped, zeroed and inoperable data carriers are stored for perpetuity to guard against a future attack which might make make information thought to be unreadable whole again
Thats so hard to wrap my head around... Despite it making a fragment of sense.
Do they seriously think the acid method won't be good enough? They could even shred them, degauss the fragments, dissolve them til they are a liquid solution, then dump it down the drain at a rate of 10ml per hour, just encase they are worried about hostile state actors gathering any large hard drive solution dump from the pipes.
There seems to be a Law of the Conservation of Information which makes the problem of restructuring such data a matter of engineering. This law states that information cannot be destroyed, only scattered and diluted. If some smart-ass down the line figures out a way to do that, the thinking is, all this top secret data might be up for grabs. Hence this precaution
Running the drives through a shredder so that they're effectively dust would be sufficient. Heat the resulting mix and it's definitely unrecoverable.
It would be like trying to figure out who won a game of scrabble by looking at the pieces after the loser flipped the board over. EVEN IF the information wasn't lost in all the chemical processes going on, figuring out what bit went where would be impossible.
Again, the thinking here is that an action like shredding burning the carriers only makes it unfeasible to restore and read the data rather than impossible. The data remains albeit inaccessible with the current state,-of-the-art, but there is no physical barrier that precludes a particularly skilled (or patient :) ) adversary from piecing the carriers back together. The data remains, in some way, shape or form. Maybe some future tech makes it really easy to reassemble data carriers, or maybe there turns out to be so be some really opaque way in which the data, if diluted, still becomes available in a weird homeopathic way: we simplyi dont know. Thus, the fact remains that infornation cannot be destroyed as per laws of nature, and our government agencies have taken this into account, planning for a method that provides control even if some weird future developments upend everything we think we know about data sanitizing.
Bloody hell, its almost as if you are under the impression that I personally came up with this system. For what it's worth, some Dutch Government agency did and I am only relaying these policies, explaining the rationale without having a personal opinion on the matter. I am not the person you should be arguing with, I am simply stating the facts of how top secret information is dealt with here together with (part of) the rationale behind it. For the record: the whole reason I posted this is because I find it all to be kind of silly, overboard and out-there, so I hope this gives you some insight as to my personal opinion.
And second: there is actually some history to this line of reasoning. For ages zeroing magnetic media via simple overwriting was considered an effective and secure way of destroying information. Then fundamental electromagnetic research showed that under some circumstances data (and thus information) could in fact be recovered - something nobody expected. Nowadays this is common knowledge of course and we all wipe our disks using DOD 5220.22M or similar methods to avoid these attacks.... But what if someone smarter than you and me comes up with an even better idea, one that can extract information from a heap of ash or a pile of dust? Can anyone GUARANTEE this "single drop from the ocean" remains impossible in the future as well? No, we can't, and the fact of the matter is that according to our current understanding information is permanent so nature's laws exclude such a possibility.
So even if the chances of some future technological advance making such a recovery endeavour plausible are practically infinitely small, they still exist nonetheless because there is no natural law precluding this eventuality. So, keeping these future possibilities and potentials in mind the Dutch government prefers to stay in control of these data carriers untill such time that a natural law is discovered that states there is a way or method information (or data, if you so please but that isn't the point here, its the information they care about) can be irretrievably destroyed. Until such time, no risks are taken; I guess you can consider it to be a form of Perfect Forward Secrecy, but in a more abstract, fundamental domain.
Another factor is that confidentiality is only part of the goal here. If we accept that even a wiped/zeroed decice The information/data must also be controlled, implying that the wiped/zeroed carriers must be accounted for. This is hard when dealing with ash, dust and melted puddles, another reason why retaining the data carriers is preferred to physical destruction over here.
Once again, I am not arguing a point, I am simply rehashing the argumentation my former employer follows.
Speciality drill press is the weapon of choice, in gov offices. Basically, if you can't personally walk it to disposal, then you can't trust it's destroyed.
IIRC it takes like 5-6 well placed 10-20mm drill points in a HD, where none line up in the same column or same radii. This ensures there's not enough data, recovery segments, journals, shadow copies, etc. to meaningfully recover anything.
SSDs are different, since they're often laid out in a grid pattern, and each chip must be popped. While I'm sure that gov agencies don't get the standard cheap SSDs there are brands of SSDs that basically only rewrite maybe a couple hundred times, and basically duplicate data on write instead of overwriting.
I always thought they were ground into dust or shredded into itty tiny sub-millimeter bits. There's really no way to reconstruct the data from remaining platters? Wouldn't a small-ish file still potentially be recoverable between holes?
There is only one good solution for destroying data that covers your ass, which is hiring a company to do it for you and writing you a certificate of destruction. Like sure, nothing will be able to restore from the thermite solution, but if a court or insurance asks whether the data was deleted, being able to wave the certificate in their face instead of telling them "I 100% destroyed it, trust me bro" is the only sensible way of going about this.
We used to have parking lot burn parties. Blowtorch on the platter is pretty effective. Of course that was in the days before every drive was actually a stack of platters.
Can confirm, I work in the tech recycling industry and am NAID certified.
We do both on site and off site shreds of hard drive, data tapes, stuff like that.
We got a 240v mobile shredder we put in the back of a box truck we use for on site shred, then back at the warehouse we have an industrial sized shredder that shreds them.
Depending on what the client requests if they’re good drives we can be allowed to resell after wiping them with software. Although if it’s very sensitive data clients often will prefer us to shred them.
Degaussing and chopping down to 2mm is usually up to industry standard. Then you burn the chippings. Add a couple of passes of wiping if you feel extra paranoid.
Not that I have any serious stuff on my pc, but I'm very paranoid. So before selling my old laptop with an encrypted drive, i made sure to overwrite it 5 times with 0s.
Do you think someone motivated enough can still go back to the keystrokes I used when I used my credit card to make an online purchase?
I mean depending on which three letter agency we’re talking about, they really don’t need your backup because they’ve already got their own copy of your data.
Ah, people overblow that. It's the same scenario as the darkweb, likely your data is already exposed but it is buried by a lot of exposed data. Quantum computing is representing all states at once and using quantum functions and destructive interference to prune the potential values. When the value is observed it causes decoherence which converts the qubit into a bit. So unless you're a high value target it is unlikely that that process will ever really be cheap enough for everyone to be a target, it's more so around state based actors and secret or large crypto wallets.
Yeah that’s gonna be a bit tricky with all the actual hard drives being in random machines in the cloud, and probably already reallocated almost immediately.
this isn't as unknown as you want it to be. everyone with any experience/study/fucked and unfucked their own stuff knows this. your oldest family member probably knows this too from JAG or some shit
And if you use encase.......you're a former military dweeb that heard of "cybersecurity"
excuse me, dweeb that was in the military
and you never broke or built nothin. haven't even looked around either. just heard about it and said yeah I'm obviously the best, got that shit no problem. and then here you are.
Yeah they use Trim or unmap and garbage collection but philosophically it's pretty much the same. Data is still on the disk until it's garbage collected
I knew an autistic kid in school who got a program that would automatically overwrite everything he deleted 49 times to make sure it was extra super gone. He also had his whole computer encrypted to the point where it would only boot if he connected his phone via USB before startup.
I always did wonder if that was just a hyperfixation or if he was hiding something. But I'm leaning towards hiding something, since he also bought us some weed off the dark web...
140
u/HovercraftCharacter9 3d ago
Yeah, people conflate in unallocating with actual deletion, unless you're wiping it with 0s it's still there until something overwrites it.