Governmental Servers Wiped? Never!

Geoff writes with a story from Australia: "Eighteen AIX servers purchased from government via auction -- none of them had data removed from them. Ticket Vending and Validation source code, Payroll, Finance, Emails and Customer complaints. All there on every server; they were even nice enough to include some old backup tapes. At ~$14USD per server, it's amazing how cheap personal information has become."

This would never happen in the UK.!

[matthew.thompson]

Because we have rules which force government agencies to keep data for a certain amount of time. To get around this much of the data that was to be covered by this was wiped before the rules came into force :)

Re:14 bucks? you got ripped :)

[QuantumG]

Never underestimate the power to set office workers minds at ease by wearing blue and carrying a ladder. It's a total class issue. White collar workers think blue collar workers a beneigth them and not worth challenging.

Possibly the best reason to encrypt data from day1

[anti-NAT]

At least then you know that if the drive dies and you don't physically destroy it, for somebody to copy the data they'll have to do more than just get the drive going again.

PCB board failures are the problem. The drive won't work, yet the data on the platters is likely to still be good. PCB failures are also fairly easy to recover from - just go to ebay to buy a second hand drive of the same model, and swap the PCBs over. If it is easy for you to do, it is also easy for your adversaries.

Even if you sell a working drive, as long as you don't provide the customer with the passphrase for the encrypted filesystem where your important data resides (I'm sure I don't have to point out how stupid doing that would be), you can be sure that the above story is unlikely to happen to you.

Re:14 bucks? you got ripped :)

[Gob Gob]

Never underestimate the power to set office workers minds at ease by wearing blue and carrying a ladder. It's a total class issue. White collar workers think blue collar workers a beneigth them and not worth challenging.

Wif spilling like dat u gota oneder y!

PS: The is no class (structure) in Australia perhaps apathy, different cultures, values and amounts of cash but not class structure. Many families have blue and white collar bread winners so that kinda implies that you mean to say that within a hosehold there are two classes.

PS: My spelling and checking is crap as well :-)

same thing happened to me

[webdwarf]

We bought a second hand server from ebay which was from someone that buys ex govt stuff from auctions and it had a backup tape in it from the Brisbane Magistrates Court (Australia)

you know they could have just....

[thegoogler]

used dban [sourceforge.net], its not rocket science. just put the disk in and hit ok

o wait, this is the goverment, nevermind

About that $20 per server

[BBCWatcher]

The E20 would be a 32-bit PowerPC-based (604) server of the 100 MHz to 233 MHz variety (probably 100 MHz). Hard disk sizes would likely be in the 9 GB per disk range. Memory would be around 256 MB or perhaps more if upgraded. But the real limiting factor is that AIX support for the 32-bit hardware is coming to a close. (The 64-bit hardware has been available for quite some time now, and the latest AIX doesn't even run on 32-bit hardware.)

These servers could be nicely rehabilitated with Linux, however. In fact, they might make excellent testbeds for developers who wish to compile for Linux on POWER (in lowest common denominator fashion). And IBM hardware is deservedly respected for its quality, and these are server-class machines (unlike, say, a PowerPC 604-based Macintosh). So the buyer did very well, IMHO.

Re:14 bucks? you got ripped :)

[stigpalm]

PPS who are you trying to kid Australia's got a class system just the same as any other country. Just another example of australians kidding themselves.

Buy the way no one will get fired for this they are govenment employees where you can get sacked for just about anything except incompetance..

Re:14 bucks? you got ripped :)

[QuantumG]

Not only are you an arsehole, you're delusional too. Are you trying to tell me that Kerry Packer is middle class? Brick layers, and factory workers, they take home the same as programmers do they? We may not have the impoverished underclass of the US but we still have class struggle in Australia.

Shoulda used...

[Mechcozmo]

http://www.killdisk.com/ [killdisk.com]

I've only used the free demo but its a great floppy. And it runs FreeDOS too.

Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac OS X has a secure disk formatting tool (and secure empty trash) included. I think its based on this [sourceforge.net]. Its very, very slow but it would seem that it's almost impossible to recover the data after it is used.

Re:Please read DBAN FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. Guttman recently posted to a bugtraq discussion about this. He stated that the density on modern drives is such that a few passes of pseudo-random data is perfectly adequate. Tracking information is less likely to be off on modern HDDs, which makes random passes just as adeqaute as the Guttman method was on older HDDs. So in short, modern HDDs are even easier to wipe than the older HDDs were.

Re:Not trivial though

[DRobson]

Try Darik's-boot-and-nuke, pretty damn easy especially if you set it up to auto wipe things on boot. Last time I tried it there was next to no user intervention needed (And that was a while back). http://dban.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Boot and Nuke

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like alot of people here have no idea how to erase a hard drive. If you are worried about your personal data being recovered, reformatting doesn't cut it.

A bit of info: when you delete a file from your computer, the file still remains on the hard drive. Your OS is simply deleting the reference to the file from the file table. Any amateur could easily recover the file, even after a FAT or NTFS formatting.

The simplest way is Darik's Boot and Nuke [sourceforge.net], aka DBAN. The name says it all. Boot up DBAN, and it will nuke every hard drive it sees.

There are other tools you can use, I am too lazy to look them up for you, but a quick search on sourceforge should yield you some file erasing tools. Many tools will offer you different levels of protection, all the way up to the standards that the Department of Defense uses.

Re:Data Eradication / the Nuclear Option

[Kahless2k]

I work in a hospital; and we have come up with a very effective way of dealing with hard drives...

• Step 1: Low-Level Format
• Step 2: Beat drive to bloody pulp
• Step 3: Put said drive into the CT Scanner or MRI

This leaves us with a blank, smashed and scrambled drive. At this point, depending on the type of data stored, the remains of the drive head off to the incinerator...

This may sound like going overboard, but we're dealing with patient information, and we take it very seriously.

Re:Please read DBAN FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the fuck was this modded as interesting? His conclusion is completely wrong.

It's as good as random scrubbing. Which is not that effective anyway.

That is complete bullshit. This guy obviously has not read Guttman's recent comments about this exact topic. Random (pseudo-random data) passes on new HDDs are more effective than the 35 passes Guttman suggested on older HDDs, because newer HDDs do not have the tracking misalignment problem that older drives had; they are more consistent. So, it's much easier and takes far less effort to overwrite data on newer drives, even if newer drives don't allow access to many lower level functions.

Re:you know they could have just....

[justins]

"o wait" There's no AIX version of dban. Duh.

Re:Understandable . . .

[sconeu]

The spec for declassification is DOD-5220.22M

Re:Not trivial though

[Kent Recal]

Unless you know more about secure data deletion than Peter Gutmann [sourceforge.net] you should use wipe [sourceforge.net] for the job and not attempt to re-invent it. Wipe is open source and has been available for almost 10 years.

I went to a course on IT security sponsored

[multiplexo]

by DISCO, the Defense Indusrial Security Clearance Office or (yes, they are referred to as "DISCO", yes it is an incredibly contrived acronym, no I am not making this [dss.mil] up) and one of the things the instructor discussed was a case where the Department of Justice had surplussed some PCs to various local law enforcement agenties back in the late 1980s. The PCs had not been wiped and a tech savvy cop in Virginia started going through one of them and lo and behold he found the DoJs witness protection program list, unencrypted, just waiting there for sale to the highest bidder.

Fortunately he was an honest man and didn't sell the list, rather he contacted the DoJ and DoJ contacted DISCO to help get their shit together. The instructor was making the point that when you surplus equipment that you really need to make sure that you wipe the drives and any other storage media. His bias was that the easiest way to do this was to physically remove and destroy the media because you could never really be sure if a wipe program had worked (well you could go over the drive to make sure that it had been erased, but who's going to do this?).

When I don't want to physically destroy a drive but want to make sure that it's gone I either wipe it with a low-level hardware format utility such as the one built into Adaptec SCSI cards, or I use a program such as autoclave [washington.edu] by Josh Larios (which he isn't supporting any more outside of the University of Washington community) although now I guess I'll have to try the recommended replacement Darik's Boot and Nuke [sourceforge.net]. A side benefit of programs such as this one is that they really exercise the Hell out of your disks, which is great to smoke out any potential failures.