[Ryedale] wiping hard drives

[Paul Teasdale]

On Tuesday 22 Aug 2006 14:19, Al Girling wrote:

Hi Al,
>
> <SNIP>
>
> Now I remember this subject being discussed over a year ago on the YLUG
> list and most people seemed to favour the big hammer/total destruction
> route.  I know someone who used to be able to get second hand kit from
> an MOD source but this wouldn't include hard drives for security
> reasons.  Which suggests to me the MOD don't trust any type of software
> solutions to this problem.
>
As you probably know I have worked for two companies (in the past) that do MOD 
work and this is indeed absolutely true in my experience. Any obsolete PC 
equipment has the hard drive removed and crushed. All other storage media was 
destroyed too should it be required (e.g. such as tapes and CDs/DVDs etc).

> I personally prefer the big hammer approach, but then I'm slightly
> paranoid. I do wonder if encrypting sensitive documents with GPG might
> be a solution, but against that there will have been un-encrypted
> versions on the machine which may be recoverable.  I realise that since
> this was discussed the improvements in software to hide data will have
> improved, but so too will have the criminals ability to recover it!
>
I don't think GPG is a fail safe solution for the exact point you set out 
above (i.e. at some point in time there is an un-encrypted document lying 
around). It may be slightly safer if the whole filesystem was encrypted but 
it's still possible to decrypt with time and effort or more simply by 
obtaining the key (that I have on a yellow post it note under the desk :)

I don't know if it is possible to completely wipe a hard drive by overwriting 
it a number of times with garbage, zeros or whatever. I know I certainly 
wouldn't know where to start and recover it but maybe an expert would.

Just my thoughts.

Regards,
Paul.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/ryedale/attachments/20060822/1f4fa76c/attachment.bin