[geeks] jackassery from the BBC

[Mike Meredith]

On Thu, 8 Jan 2009 11:44:09 -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> On Jan 8, 2009, at 3:19 AM, "kevin r. marshall" <kevin at pipeline.com>  
> wrote:
> 
> > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7816446.stm
> >
> > BBC advocates complete physical destruction of hard drives for
> > data saftey.

Er ... no it doesn't. It reports that Which? Computing has recovered
data from hard disks bought from Ebay and that _they_ recommend
physical destruction. The BBC then goes on to say "experts say for most
consumers that's a step too far".

> > Maybe we could start a cottage industry with this... go door to  
> > door, charge $50 a pop and your only startup costs are an A2
> > Philips driver and baby sledge.

There's already a fair amount of competition. I regularly walk past a
van sent round by a firm that offers on-site shredding of documents,
tapes, and disks (for a firm of soliciters), and $work also contracts
out data destruction.

If you're going into the cottage industry, don't bother with the
sledge-hammer; you can just offer secure deletion of the data and
re-use the disks.

> I always view these stories being more about how most folks don't  
> exercise even minimal data security than about how easy it is to  
> retrive info from discarded HDs...

On the bright side, it does raise the profile of this and hopefully
gets some who should be interested in how their work data is handled
asking a few questions.

> Here at $work we use Darik's Boot And Nuke (http://www.dban.com/)
> and we are comfortable with the results vs. effort involved.

If I were writing something to do that I would be tempted to write
something that wrote fake personal information on the disk ... after
all who is going to look at the bits 'underneath' if they think they've
already found what they're after ? If I put my tin-foil hat on, I would
think this has probably already happened :)

-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
 Power corrupts; Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.
 -- Vint Cerf