Cocktail party geek: Me, Myself and My Old Machine
See this thing in the picture? It’s a hard drive. That circular thing? It’s called the “platter” and it’s where all your information gets written by the “head” (the tip of that arm). The way it works is pretty simple but you’re going to have to bear with me on an analogy that will span about a paragraph :) Imagine a garden. This is a square garden with rows. Each row was planted with different seeds and you know what was planted where by the signs at the end of the row. You know that row one has carrots, row two has potatoes etc. As the seeds are underground, the signs are important for identification of a row’s contents. If you remove the sign, the carrots are still planted in row one (duh), but it would be easy to plant something new in the same space, killing both the new plant and your old carrots… A hard drive works in the exactly the same way. Information (types of vegetable) is written to sectors (rows) and we know what is where by an index (the sign). If you remove the index entry (the sign) then you may overwrite the data (replant), destroying the old data (our carrots). So what’s the point? When you delete data from your hard drive, your computer just changes the signs on the row. It’s too time consuming to overwrite every piece of data. A brilliant (or maybe just persistent) hacker would have an easy time extracting that information. It’s still there, sitting in the original row like our seeds from the garden. That computer you donated to charity is carrying around your credit card number in the carrots row, your social security number in the potatoes row etc… even if you think you’ve deleted the files! Scary eh? What you can do, in order of increasing effectiveness:
- Use the disks that came with your computer to reformat the hard drive before you donate or throw away that old machine. Often this is as simple as restarting the computer with the disk in the drive and selecting reformat from the menu options. This will make it a bit harder to get at the old data… but not impossible… and you’ll hope that no hackers ever get your donated machine…
- If you are feeling like a hardcore geek, you can “shred” the contents of your disk. Darik’s Boot and Nuke is a program designed to destroy the contents of your machine. Obviously, this is absolutely as dangerous as it sounds :)
- If you have 25 bucks and are using a PC, you can simply pay someone to erase your hard drive for you. Erase your hard drive is a company that might work, but a Google search will bring up a few different options. I’d recommend walking into your local electronics store and asking if they have a service…
As always, there’s stuff you don’t need to know: Hard drives are actually written with magnets and I think the Wikipedia article might be one of the best I’ve seen. More detail on how to wip a drive if you choose to do it yourself.
And finally, this video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eMWG3fwiEU]
~ab
PS: Thanks again Catherine for the great topic!!!
There is also an app called SafeIT Shredder which works with your Trash Can and so when you decide to ‘empty it’ rather then just ‘deleting the signs’ it ‘removes the seeds’ (just the way you thought it was since that is the point of analogies such as ‘Empty Trash’ when it should really be called ‘Sweep it under the Rug’)
Shredder also plugs into Outlook so you can erase emails directly from it and be sure they are gone (as an aside they really need a ‘Do you REALLY want to send this email?’ plug-in based on time-of-day and keywords but i digress)
A great app when you are *not* nuking your garden but want to make sure that if you decide you don’t want carrots anymore (if you ever reallly did) there will be no seeds left as evidence and you can plant again.
Ok back to my garden…
Follow-up link;
http://www.safeit.com/products/index.asp#shredding
Thanks, Alex. But say you have an OLD computer–like from college. You don’t still have the reformatting disks and it’s too old to bother hooking it up to the internet. And it’s been hanging out in your parents basement for the last 8 years because you’re too scared to throw it out. Is there a way to safely manually remove the hard drive, recycle the rest of the computer and smash up the hard drive into tiny little pieces with a hammer? This seems somewhat simpler and also slightly more fun? How do I do that?
Nice hypothetical situation, very inventive ;)
I think smashing electronics into tiny pieces with a hammer is a highly-underrated activity and one that Alex can probably confirm I’ve long been a proponent of. My perspective is more one of techno-revenge then security but I’d suppose you can combine the two.
I don’t think however it is simpler, but more fun; yes yes and yes. If you need help holding it down I’ll be glad to help there.
I don’t know what you’d actually recycle from an 8-year old computer; motherboards, video-cards, floppy-drives (Alex can explain what these were in another post), all are pretty useless, worthless and in many cases not compatible and will cause more headaches then they are worth. Certainly (inherent value + removal-time) / joy of wanton destruction ratio is quite low.
May I suggest beating the entire computer to pieces until you reach the hard-drive and then working on that especially well?
Oh Alex would like me to responsibly inform you that computers have gold/nickel/platinum/etc so that you may want to consider;
a) Goggles (not Googles)
b) Gloves
c) Take pictures before/during/after
d) Dispose of safely
I’d also like to add the following:
Here is a link to the epa page for disposing of hardware. It might take 10 minutes research, but you can always use this to minimize the environmental impact after you bash the thing to smithereens…
Here is a link to Will it Blend, a site where they destroy stuff with a blender. It’s a very satisfying alternative to Michael’s proposed violence :)
As a last little note, your hard drive, when smashed (which may be tough to do… ) will still have recognizable information on it. I’m sorry to say that blanking it is still the best option…
~ab
I love Alex’s thoroughness, however may I point out that (as far as I know) you did not work for the KGB in college (I would have intuited this even if they had not been defunct for a decade when you attended college) and there is little chance anyone will
a) follow you to whatever disposal location you ultimately find on ‘the epa page’
b) wait for cover of dark
c) collect the pits and pieces of your destroyed but reconstructible hard drive platter
d) re-assemble
e) pull the ‘seeds’ out of the ‘garden’ to re-assemble the ‘recognizable data’ from your college correspondence
Thus I must stand by my original position; whacking the heck out of the pc and drive is the best and funnest option.