wow look at this thing absolutely mangle
let's do another
one wait why am I doing this aside from
it being totally intoxicating well because these old server drives behind
me are loaded with data that is so sensitive that I am legally obligated to
destroy them since we're at it anyway I thought I'd show you guys the atrack
Mobile Data Destruction system here complete with dealing magnet and
hydraulic press when this thing's done with your drive you will not be getting
anything off of it but lonus you might say what about an
SSD oh that's got to
hurt turns out it can do those too but lonus you might say think of the turtles
or your staff I need hard drive couldn't I just erase them and sell them
maybe at a nice discount the answer is yes but also more complicated than you
might expect there are a lot of ways to
erase data and they're not all created equal kind of like my Segway to our
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purchase or subscription nice a quick search of eBay will reveal tons of
listings for used magnetic hard drives so clearly plenty of folks out there are
taking the wipe and resell approach but
as you probably already know just hitting delete and emptying the recycle
bin is not a secure method of erasing data and even a format doesn't
necessarily make everything on a storage
device unrecoverable just check out the results of of using test disc on an SD
card full of deleted text files if you don't believe me so to prepare a drive
for sale you need to do things right pun
intended because the simplest method of doing that is to write zeros over the
entire disc then you want to go back and
read it to ensure that there's nothing but zeros to be found it's quite
effective at preventing someone with a simple piece of free software from
recovering all of your as recipes but
what if you're a bank or hospital or the
CIA well the answer there is it depends
in the past Nells could conceivably use
a technique called magnetic force microscopy to pull data off of a drive
that had already been overwritten the
idea behind it was that not every right operation on a particular bit of storage
would be lined up with exact precision on the disc we're going to have a couple
of papers in the description linked down below it's super interesting stuff and
this potential attack Vector led to a series of data deletion standards that
would call for between three and three dozen passes riding over the drive
alternately filling it with zeros then ones then random characters or even
predefined patterns with modern hard drives like these ones however the
components and the tolerances have shrunk so much that the possibility of
fragments being left behind that could be read is basically zero so new
standards like nist 888 have come along
which now say that four storage devices containing magnetic media a single
overwrite pass with a fixed pattern such as binary zeros typically hinders
recovery of data even if state-of-the-art laboratory equipment is
used to attempt it so you're probably thinking if anyone with a computer could
could do that at home why is this machine still
necessary well the issue is doing it at
scale you see with great capacity comes
great right times so even drives that
have built-in ATA secur race commands which should be anything made after
about 2001 can take hours or even an
overnight operation to fully clear and
if you're that hypothetical bank or three-letter agency you could have
hundreds or even thousands of drives to
sanitize and dispose of nobody got time
for that I mean even if you were willing to pay some Junior IT Tech to wipe
drives all day every day buddy better have the appropriate clearance to handle
it and even if they do something is eventually going to slip through the
cracks like like that one time when my
former employer didn't wipe their employee records yeah yeah good times I mean that
was bad enough but hey look imagine if the data slipping through the cracks was
I don't know a list of your nation's covert intelligence sources in North
Korea or something that is where the
Mobile Data Destruction system comes in it's fast enough to process Mount hard
drive here that's another fun dad joke
in about an hour and the first stage is
the deusser and this bad boy is no joke
we all know that hard drive storage is magnetic but what a lot of people don't
realize is that this is perfectly safe you would need a
much stronger magnet than anything you'd find on a screwdriver to do anything to
a modern drive and there are a lot of different ways to skin this cat but this
particular unit builds up an electrical charge in its capacitors then discharges
the energy as one big highfrequency
electromagnetic pulse so long as that pulse is stronger than the hard drive's
coercivity that is its resistance to Magnetic change the pulse will randomize
the polarity of all the little magnetic bits wiping out the data permanently and
this is really important the drive doesn't need to be functional for the
deaser to be effective you guys ready
this bad boy puts out a field of about 10,000 gaus which is about double the
coercivity of both conventional and shingled hard drives there it goes
meaning that aside from the data itself being gone all the tracks on the
platters will be destroyed and anecdotally we've heard that it can even
shift around internal components or demagnetize the permanent magnets in the
drive it's kind of the uh nuke it from
orbit option it still looks perfectly normal but this drive is now completely
unusable which raises a question why do
we need the rest of this getup here well modern privacy and data protection
laws require a more systematic approach and the mdds is more than just a dealer
and a Crusher on a cart let me show you guys the workflow we start by scanning
in the serial number of our drive then placing it here to take a before picture
atrack is working on an AI module that will just read the serial number from
the picture but that's not ready yet then it pops into the deusser we've
already hit this drive once but doing it again isn't going tot it any more than
it already is run right now it's
charging up its capacitors then it's going to take all that power and I don't
know if you'd call that an electromagnetic pop or thunk does anyone
around here got a pacemaker no oh good probably should have checked that before
we started but everyone's still standing I think we're all right atra says that
we should only measure about five of this units 10,000 gaus directly above
the unit where the shielding is weakest that could potentially impact older
pacemakers but that's within the occupational safety limits for short
exposure so should be fine after the
thud we wait for the Raspberry Pi controller to pop up once this readout
says success the data is gone but this next step is still important for a few
reasons one it gives us an obvious
visual indicator that uh this thing ain't going to work no more two the more
extreme data protection standards do still call for physical construction and
number three this is the most important it's super fun to watch oh you doing
okay buddy it didn't go it's not it's in there the right way
I don't want to not follow the instructions did I put it upside down or
something matter destruction fail open door oh this is a helium drive this is a
sealed drive we spoke with at Rack about the difficulty that we had crushing
these beefier unibody hard drives and it turns out the crusher in our cart was
modified if IED to run on 110v Power and as a result doesn't have quite the same
oomph of the production units at Rack picked up a few of these drives to
double check and their production unit made short work of them once the drive
is crushed we shake any loose bits out into the drawer down here throw it back
under the camera for an after picture and all of that gets logged to atra's
redundant Cloud servers and then you can print off a certificate of Destruction
for your local records kind of wonder what else we could crush in this thing
that would make a great Floatplane exclusive maybe uh yeah we'll have the social team
do that lg. g/f flat plane coming soon that aside I can practically hear you
guys saying L is what about ssds don't worry we're going to get to that but
first we need to at least mention new magnetic hard drive Technologies like
heat assisted magnetic recording or hammer in a nutshell these Cutting Edge
drives achieve much greater storage density by using platter materials with
much higher coercivity as you can imagine from when we were talking about
about the deusser this helps to prevent accidental flips to nearby bits when
they're exposed to the right head but it presents some other challenges like well
how do you intentionally write to the bit you're actually targeting it's super
cool in less than a nond they heat the
target bit up with a laser to around 450° C which reduces the coercivity then
they it and rapidly cool it back down to
lock in the data at this time we're not aware of a deusser that is capable of
clearing a hammer drive yet but we're told that they are in the works so for
now a drive Shredder might be your best bet for Hammer at Rack told us they're
working on a shredder attachment for this unit and if you guys are into this stuff I would love to get our hands on
it and show it to you now let's finally talk about ssds and all your other
non-magnetic storage the deuser isn't
going to do Jack squat to these either and overriding them might not be Totally
Secure either if the drive uses automatic wear leveling which pretty
much any modern consumer SSD would as
with hammer drives then that leaves you with secure Ras which at least is
refreshingly quick on an SSD and if properly implemented should be good
enough for anyone to resell the drive without worrying about recovery but in
cases where you have to be 100% sure that nothing's getting through the cracks our Crusher has a cool little
accessory that not only crushes the drives but also ensures damage to each
and every memory chip on the board that's scary looking let's give it
a try all we got to do is pull out the hard drive
attachments okay put this bad boy in here H yeah
something like that seems
legit you want to see a 2 and 1/2 in or an m.2 yes all right right well let's
start with one of the I mean not the heck it could probably do both here we
go sayara buddy
oh oh there we go did we get all the chips let's see let's see oh wow I mean
the whole board came in half that's probably a good sign Nan chip
dead nand chip in half other more
different Nan chip that's not quite half but that's definitely some fraction the
controller survived but there's no data on there last n chip definitely dead now
how about this boy oh okay
well there's one n chip I think it's
dead obviously we are talking thousands of dollars in the hardware alone not to
mention the software and integration work around this whole process and the
Redundant servers around the world keeping your logs safe for years to come
but the way that at Rack envisions things these carts are going to just
live in the data center they're safe to use in either the hot or cold aisle and
with an all-inclusive leasing cost of less than $1,000 a month they should
quickly pay for themselves in time saved
I personally would love to see them have an attachment maybe I don't know down
here or something where you can load in drives for security racing that maybe
could then be tested and sold if they still work I mean if it's bad obviously
just Crush those ones but I can also understand that regulations is
regulations at least until we can change them
and I do get it even if I don't like it
oh there's one more thing we should touch on let's talk about seds or self-
encrypting drives these have a data encryption key that set at the factory
and they automatically encrypt or decrypt data that is being written to or
read from the drive the whole thing is transparent to the user apart from
entering their password at boot the cool trick with these is that without the the
key the data on the drive is essentially just random characters so all you need
to do to erase that drive permanently is
to overwrite the data encryption key this is called a cryptographic erase and
is effectively instantaneous making it perhaps the most time effective method
of Data Destruction while still allowing reuse of the drive many ssds have self-
encryption features like these already but don't enable them by default so you
can check the security settings in your PC BIOS or do a little bit of Googling
to figure out how to get started on your platform software-based encryption Works
similarly and is also possible but usually comes with some kind of
performance hit so we'll have a couple guides linked down below it's important
to remember in all of this that the schemes we're talking about though are
for protecting the data at rest on the drive or once it's dead this is not
magically protecting that picture of your lunch that you're uploading to the
gram and while self- encrypting discs and full dis encryption might be the
best way forward there's still going to be a place for setups like this for a
long time because reliable trackable Data Destruction is critical for many
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LT and get 10% off today if you guys liked this video maybe check out the one
from a few years back about the red key Data Destruction tool it's still
available for purchase even if they don't have the cool key-shaped USB drive
anymore