News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by bobthepanda on Friday December 06, 2019 @03:30AM (#21720088)
If you want something done right (like making sure your data is no longer on someone else’s hard drive), you should really do it yourself.

Zeroing filling a hard drive isn’t hard.

Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by viraptor on Friday December 06, 2019 @05:04AM (#21720460)
But also not really guaranteed to do what you want in case of SSDs. It may. Or it may get optimised/balanced leaving lots of data behind.
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by washadjeffmad on Friday December 06, 2019 @05:43AM (#21720630)
Years ago we settled on using block device encryption for all flash storage and then destroying the headers or revoking all keys.

This satisfies the infeasibility requirement of NIST SP 800-88 without relying on flash vendors to have appropriately implemented ATA command standards like secure erase, which almost none fully do.

Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by zmix on Friday December 06, 2019 @09:54AM (#21722224)
This destroys the filesystem, but not the physical disk, right? I mean, will the SSD be usable after that, albeit, by installing a new filesystem and reformatting?
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by washadjeffmad on Saturday December 07, 2019 @01:23PM (#21731719)
Correct. It's not like when degaussing wipes the track information from a HDD.

This is also as opposed to relying on the self-encrypting feature on most modern flash. Whether you're dealing with high enough asset value to warrant this level of interest or are just beholden to the same standards, you should reach out to your flash vendor for clarification.

Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by toyg on Friday December 06, 2019 @08:26AM (#21721553)
No OS handling sensitive data should ever save on unencrypted volumes, ever. Particularly nowadays - with BitLocker and FileVault it’s trivial to achieve this even on desktops and laptops. When you want to kill the data, you just destroy the/any key and you’re done.

Why rely on hardware encryption, when software encryption is basically free?

Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by Aeolun on Friday December 06, 2019 @05:07AM (#21720479)
I guess a hammer takes care of that too :)
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by sharedfrog on Friday December 06, 2019 @04:52AM (#21720401)
For anyone curious as to how, GNU `shred` can do that. Something like:

`shred --force --zero /dev/sda`

should wipe the whole drive, overwriting 3 times (the default) with random bits and once with all zeroes.

Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by jki275 on Friday December 06, 2019 @09:15AM (#21721884)
Unfortunately this is not necessarily effective on modern SSDs.
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by darkmighty on Thursday December 12, 2019 @09:04PM (#21778539)
Writing random bits is more or less guaranteed to work on the bulk of the data. There are small caveats with caches, degraded cells, and other degradation management mechanisms, but I would be quite surprised if anything can be extracted; the chance of have a critical piece of data remain recoverable (at great effort) should be insignificant for most applications. I do wish manufacturers would make a 'wipe all memory and caches' command, but it's not exactly in their interest to ease resale of used hardware... (it could be pitched as increased customer value).

This whole destruction thing is very economically and environmentally nonsensical to me.

Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by a012 on Friday December 06, 2019 @05:54AM (#21720677)
Nothing is more secure than wipe them with a hammer
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by seb314 on Friday December 06, 2019 @06:12AM (#21720760)
depends on your threat model... if peaces bigger than dust are left over, they might still contain quite a lot of info, right?
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by vidarh on Friday December 06, 2019 @09:13AM (#21721873)
If you mean a big sledgehammer, maybe. Speaking from experience, even with a chisel making more than a dent in a modern harddrive with a hammer in ways that can't be fixed by replacing a pcb or other parts is hard work.
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by tyingq on Friday December 06, 2019 @07:02AM (#21721054)
Aren't commercial degaussers still a thing? A hammer still leaves big chunks.
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by genera1 on Friday December 06, 2019 @09:12AM (#21721868)
They are, and aren't that expensive. Our IT support team has one for workstation drives in a company with around 1000 employees.
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by sharedfrog on Friday December 06, 2019 @06:18AM (#21720790)
Do both!
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by squarefoot on Friday December 06, 2019 @06:29AM (#21720852)
Not an expert here (suggestions welcome), but maybe short of having some thermite at hand, multiple passes of dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/disk would be more effective against well equipped parties. There are ways to extract data from zeroed platters in a clean room with the right equipment; writing random data multiple times should be harder to defeat.
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by hvidgaard on Friday December 06, 2019 @08:33AM (#21721593)
I don't think anyone have ever demonstrated the ability to recover data after a few overwrites on any modern harddisk. The entire concept of "residual" magnetism that you can reliably measure sounds ridicules to an engineer.
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by michaelt on Friday December 06, 2019 @10:16AM (#21722467)
AFAIK no-one has ever demonstrated the ability to recover data after a single overwrite. Someone offered a prize for such recovery, back in 2008 [1] which was never claimed (although the prize was only of symbolic value).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117588

Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by squarefoot on Saturday December 07, 2019 @12:44PM (#21731495)
I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but if I was a 3 letter agency with infinite resources (so also no need to claim any prizes, no matter how much tempting they can be) and succeeded in recovering data that way, I would never tell anyone. Doing so would reveal what I can do, and by extension send the message "next time do a multiple pass wipe" which in the end would reveal what I cannot do.
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by hvidgaard on Monday December 09, 2019 @03:23AM (#21741144)
Considering that brilliant physicists and engineers have private access to state of the art technology, I find it highly unlikely that NSA/FBI/CIA/??? have figured out how to do this, but no one else have.
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by NKK6co7lnafKvg on Friday December 06, 2019 @08:39AM (#21721630)
On Linux this will generally be CPU bound instead of IO bound because urandom is very slow. It's much faster to mount it as an encrypted drive with a random key and then dd over the encrypted mapping.

Eg:

cryptsetup open --type plain --key-file /dev/urandom --key-size 256 $DEV crypttmp

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mapper/crypttmp bs=4k

Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by jowsie on Friday December 06, 2019 @07:05AM (#21721070)
Last place I worked where we had to dispose of customer harddrives, we had some home made contraption that was basically a metal frame with a bottle jack that moved a pickaxe head. No data coming back after a few passes with that.
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by tyingq on Friday December 06, 2019 @07:18AM (#21721131)
Basically a tabletop hydraulic press. You can buy those for under $200.
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by GrumpyNl on Friday December 06, 2019 @03:38AM (#21720115)
Every hd i ever had and didnt use anymore, i smash a 2 inch nail through it. Thats permanent.
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by bobthepanda on Friday December 06, 2019 @03:43AM (#21720142)
They said they rented the disks, so that probably wasn’t possible.

Renting physical hard drives does seem pretty dumb, though.

Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by tpmx on Friday December 06, 2019 @03:51AM (#21720169)
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201912060021.html

The hard drives had been used for data sharing servers at the prefectural government office and were replaced with new ones in the spring.

The prefectural government had deleted the data, but the successful bidder of the hard drives was able to restore them by using special software. The government is trying to locate the remaining nine hard drives, which were also sold online in July to August.

The data servers had been leased from Fujitsu Leasing Co., which commissioned Broadlink Co. to scrap the replaced hard drives.

Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by bobthepanda on Friday December 06, 2019 @04:02AM (#21720197)
There’s deletion, and then there’s deletion.

Zero-filling, one-filling, and random-filling all the bits of a hard drive is sufficient to make previous data effectively unretrievable. That doesn’t sound like what happened here.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13674/is-it-pos...

Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by raverbashing on Friday December 06, 2019 @05:02AM (#21720450)
"deleted"

I would bet a lot of money they dragged the files to the "recycle bin" then maybe emptied it

If they were external drives it's likely they were on FAT32 which makes it even easier

Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by mysterydip on Friday December 06, 2019 @06:07AM (#21720741)
Something to keep in mind when buying datacenter infrastructure is that "next day onsite support" might want to take the failed drive back with them in exchange for the new working one. I know Dell at least has a "keep your hard drive" option for an extra fee.
Re:Kanagawa government hard disks swiped, sold online by avar on Friday December 06, 2019 @07:42AM (#21721262)
"Renting" hardware that you "own" is relatively normal. E.g. buy a 1U server with everything from a <provider>, pay some subscription fee so they keep upgrading it to the latest thing.

It's a way to shift inventory management to the supplier, the alternative would be to employ people to try to sell used 1U servers & components.

Those companies will then pick up your used server, wipe it, and sell it to someone else. Depending on the contract that'll include physically intact hard drives.