In a case such as this...what I would do is take a small 5 lbs
sledgehammer and finish the job! :-) If you smash the platters together
so that the platters are touching each other they will not spin up....it
is highly unlikely that someone would take a drive with this extensive
damage and open it...remove the platters in a clean room
environment..and attempt to recover partial data from the disk.
Possible yes...but not probable.
-----Original Message-----
From: gwen hastings [mailto:bugtraq@rxcbc.org]
Sent: Monday, March 21, 2005 1:25 PM
To: Christopher Blume
Cc: Ivan Krstic; forensics@securityfocus.com
Subject: Reality and 2.5" laptop drives, Re: Macintosh wiping (but why)
As a person who has actually destroyed LOTS of laptop and desktop drives
both by accident and on purpose, I can infer that this discussion is
being conducted by people who have never tried exposing a 2.5 " laptop
drive to a very strong magnet, in this case a rare-earth 1" long
halfmoon weighing less than 1 oz.. it physically distorted the drive
casing from outside the laptop totally destroying the heads and access
electronics BUT NOT DELETEING THE DATA.
All degaussers I have ever worked with have been for magtape,floppies,
superdisks etc NOT harddrives.
BTW when wardriving Never EVER let the magmount for your gain attenae
contact the bottom of your laptop, it WILL again destroy the access
mechanism while leaving the data intact for recovery.
A degausser WONT clean the drive but it WILL make it ready for
disposal, and forensic recovery of the data.
sheesh..
Christopher Blume wrote:
Not that I'm a hard drive expert or anything -- but I wonder why would
question the degausser's ability to work on hard drives of a certain
modernity or capacity.
I have no idea about the assurance these things come with regarding
data security -- but we did use them to wipe drives a few years back
at a college -- not for disposal, just to clean the machine out for
another department.
-Chris
Ivan Krstic wrote:
Greg Freemyer wrote:
The're available, they are just the size of a small refridgerator
and need a dedicated circuit.
It's been a while since the subject matter really interested me, and
it seems the degaussers have gotten quite a bit more powerful over
the years. Perhaps someone with more current knowledge of hard drive
engineering can pitch in here, but I'm not sure even a 4000 Oersted
degausser is enough to wipe the most modern generations of hard
drives (say, 250GB and above).
-IK
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