[geeks] jackassery from the BBC

[kevin r. marshall]

I agree.  It's just too easy these days to efficiently wipe data from drives to understand why more IT staff do not do so.  I always made sure that any drive that left my previous job was wiped and welcomed people to bring in their home machines for the same treatment if they were planning on donating those machines to charity. 

On the other hand, other people's laziness can be entertaining.  There was a period in time a few years back when i would pick up any cheap SGI (drive attached) box from eBay just to see what data it contained.   

/KRM


On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 11:44:09AM -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.
>>
>> Persoannly, until i see data thevies shelling out for scanning electron 
>> microscopy, i'm not terribly concerned.
>>
>> 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.
>
> 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...
>
> An IT version of "look how easy it is to get into someone's house if they 
> don't lock all the doors and windows."
>
> Here at $work we use Darik's Boot And Nuke (http://www.dban.com/) and we 
> are comfortable with the results vs. effort involved.
>
> Lionel
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