[GRLUG] Disk scrubber

[Bob Kline]

 You'd think that if security of all kinds
 was the issue,  and the hard drive
 industry really could provide an effective
 erase mechanism,  that overall security
 would be improved by implementing it.
 That was people could, in principle,
 erase their drives thoroughly before
 they get rid of them.  How many would
 actually bother is always a question.

 But as we read repeatedly,  the bigger
  problem seems to be simple theft.  Gov't
 laptops ( tax payer laptops really ) seem
 to disappear daily,  and somehow they
 always seem to have a few million Social
 Security or credit card numbers on them,
  or all the military's codes and plans.
 One can provide certain kinds of security,
 but it might just be that the big ticket
 items are from people just walking away
 with the hard drive or the machine it's in.

     -Bob



On 7/25/06, Tim Schmidt <timschmidt at gmail.com> wrote:

> That said, modern drives are small embedded computers, with megabytes
> of ram, high-performance DSPs, and plenty of programmable hardware.
> In theory at least, there's nothing stopping WD or Seagate from
> including a backdoor of sorts that allows analogue access to the drive
> platter.  Given the cooperation of color laser printer manufacturers
> with the US Gov, as well as the telecoms, and the banks...  why not
> the drive OEMs?
>
> --tim
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