Stories from the Bench: Wipe Out

[Decker]

You can erase a HDD with a magnet, but from my understanding to COMPLEATLY erase it, you need one hell of a magnet.

[Cyphr]

as i've said before if you have something you REALLY dont want anyone to see (like a supervirus you plan to relase ) Rare earth magnet/electromagnet for 15 minutes (spinning it the whole time)
slegehammer
bucket with lighter fluid and fire
dump half of this in the toiulet and the other half ina nearby creek or failing that spread it in a field hansel and gretel file

[lordlundar]

I currently have my old platters as a coaster. Keep the data, junk the rest.

[Dark-Star]

A much better way is to store sensitive data on flash drives. Magnetic media (FDDs, HDDs) is notoriously hard to erase totally.

But with a thumbdrive? Heh, heh, heh...

First run overwriting software of choice. Then remove cover, smash memory chip (the biggest one on the little circuit) with a heavy flat object. Data is GONE. You'd need nanobots to even think of physical reassembly - never mind anything stored on it.

[Tuxian]

Wasnt there a thing on Court TV a while back about detectives finding a cut up floppy or HD.. forget which.. and putting it back together and solving a murder?

I saw that one. The evidence against a guy was on a floppy disk. Guy was being interrogated, and they show him the disk. Guy, who obviously knew they had it, grabs the disk and runs out of the room, and proceeds to cut the disk up with pinking shears, leaving the disk in lots of little folded, uneven pieces.

They managed to read the disk by first flattening the pieces out, then attaching them to brand-new disks, and reading the data fragments on each piece, then putting them all back together. Guy ended up getting found guilty because of the letters they were able to recover. Was really a brilliant piece of police work, and a new technique in information retrieval.

[Andara Bledin]

Wasnt there a thing on Court TV a while back about detectives finding a cut up floppy or HD.. forget which.. and putting it back together and solving a murder?

That would be Forensic Files on CourtTV. The man who did the reassembly used an iron to get the pieces back to flat, and I think he used non-static tape to reattach them to each other. Brilliant work.

One of my former co-workers has a brother who does high-level data retrieval. He's one of the best in the world at it, and governments often have his facility do work for them.

CH, your manager T rocks.

*updates her sig*

^-.-^