Comments on: Throw away infected computers

by: dragonthoughts

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 17:47:47 +0000

A few years ago, when working for an IT security company, they had a policy of physical destruciton of hard drives before disposing of computers.
The reasoning was simple: They were capable of recovering a lot of data, even after fromatting, fdisking and various other procedures, but they’d never recovered data from a disk that had been through a grinder.
Ironically, one of the tools available from the company “destroys” files by multiple overwriting with random data.

by: Michael Pollitt

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 10:53:05 +0000

There’s a nice file/disk wiping utility here called Eraser which was mentioned in the Information Week feature. Easy to install and use.

by: Search Engines Web

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 03:55:32 +0000

Interestingly, the older computers are GREAT for breaking in the VERY YOUNG….especially leaning word processing and spreadsheets…..

Why should they touch the ultra modern computers, yet.

by: Administrator

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 22:37:23 +0000

It’s quite normal for bigger companies to take out the harddrives before throwing out the computers. The computers are usually sent to recycling or special waste of some sort.

But for Skolelinux, you don’t need the harddrives. You can use special network cards or floppies to start the computer, and then it interacts with the server, never having anything stored locally.

by: MeanderingMan

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 22:16:09 +0000

This conversation is very timely: In my neck of the woods my Provincial government is in a lot of hot water (with voters, opposition, and even themselves) for auctioning off a big box of backup tapes and the tape drive that can read them. The successful bidder (naturally) took a look at the contents of the tapes and discovered peoples’ medical records from 1996 to 2001. Sensitive information about mental health and HIV tests, applications for income assistance based on medical conditions, etc.! Of course, they have a policy about ensuring data is destroyed (even if that means destroying the medium that carries it) but the policy is only as good as the follow-through. I FDisk my old drives (it’s sufficient, I don’t care if people recover my email correspondence to my mother) but if it was sensitive, I would just destroy the HDD. It’s easier that way.

by: Administrator

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 09:10:49 +0000

Yeah, I forgot to state that outright.

It was sort of inferred, when I was recommending avoiding windows 2000 in favor of windows 98. You’d have to at least reformat for that to happen.

I would go for the full treatment: AT LEAST fdisk and reformat. For very sensitive data, that isn’t enough. In fact, for super sensitive data, the only thing you can do, is stomp on the old harddrive, archive it and then and get another harddrive to put into the computer. And remember that old computers won’t eat brand spanking new big hard drives. Depending on how old it is, there are size constraints (number of gigabytes).

by: Joe

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 02:28:14 +0000

I was just going to add the same as My0, whether you give away or throw away, make sure that you don’t have any of your data on the machine. Just deleting your files though doesn’t mean they are gone. Not even considering the Recycle Bin, there are plenty of ways to recover deleted data. Unless you are giving it to a relative you really trust, you need to securely wipe the data.

This InformationWeek article has something about this problem.

by: My0

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 00:47:06 +0000

I went to the article and this name jumped out at me: “David Gelernter ” The NYT article quotes David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, who was a victim of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

I can undestand the surrender by many in junking their old PCs for new ones. I have wasted a lot of time, too, of ridding desktops of malware. I tend to keep my computers. The only suggestion I have for your useful comments, Spamhuntress, is recommending people deleting all their old data on the old computers they give away. They could have tax returns or other sensitive data on their old computers.