What are we looking at in your screenshot? I've been Where's-Waldoing it for the word 'destroy' but can't find it.

That's someone else's data (three someone elses' if you count the iPhone end users) read from the root block device on a minutes-old brand new fresh Digital Ocean VM that I got from them for a $5 PayPal payment. It had been mkfs'd but not zeroed.

Command was:

    apt-get -y install binutils ; dd if=/dev/vda bs=1M | strings -n 100 | grep 2013-12

The destroy api call docs are here:

https://developers.digitalocean.com

(It's the /droplets/[droplet_id]/destroy one.)

I think he's showing that the data is not "destroyed" in the sense it still exists. Destroy in a virt context doesn't necessarily mean "destroy all the resources associated with a VM"--I don't know about DO's product offering, but at the hypervisor level, at least with Xen and libvirt, you often want to "destroy" the instance (forcibly terminate/undefine from the hypervisor) and leave the resources (storage pools/devices, IP pools/addresses, network flows/filters etc). I think focusing on the word "destroy" is a bit of a canard; the real problem is insecure defaults wrt block device scrubbing when you issue an API "destroy" (which wouldn't be any better if it was called "delete" or "undefine").

nice post - also #fmc says hi ;)