Comments on: FlyClear Sends Out “Dear John” Letters http://www.liquidmatrix.org/blog/2009/06/26/flyclear-sends-out-dear-john-letters/ Bringing Fire To The Village: Your Source For Computer, Network & Information Security News from Dave Lewis, Security Blogger Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:02:55 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc hourly 1 By: Wesley McGrew http://www.liquidmatrix.org/blog/2009/06/26/flyclear-sends-out-dear-john-letters/comment-page-1/#comment-72057 Wesley McGrew Sat, 27 Jun 2009 12:06:44 +0000 http://www.liquidmatrix.org/blog/?p=6513#comment-72057 I recall seeing a photo posted to twitter of one of the Clear terminal's screens showing a completed DBAN run. That's pretty good stuff, relatively speaking to how most companies in this situation would handle data. As far as I know, most of the options for wiping a drive from DBAN should do as well as any software can for an IDE/SATA drive (just a flat dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/... would do fine too). The only real problem comes with sectors that the hard drive's decided are bad and remapped to other parts of the disk. Worst case is that these sectors are 512 bytes right in the middle of some ASCII/Unicode personally identifiable info. Hopefully, though, the drive was right about the sectors being bad, so they're unreadable, or if not, from the middle of OS/app stuff, or a 512-byte chunk of a high res iris scan or photo that's useless out of context. Either way it'd probably be more trouble than it was worth to pull a small amount of data out of the drive. I agree the drives should go through a grinder, though. Hopefully they'll do that once someone goes around and collects up the hardware. For the time being, though, this is a pretty good measure they've taken and quickly as well. I recall seeing a photo posted to twitter of one of the Clear terminal’s screens showing a completed DBAN run. That’s pretty good stuff, relatively speaking to how most companies in this situation would handle data. As far as I know, most of the options for wiping a drive from DBAN should do as well as any software can for an IDE/SATA drive (just a flat dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/… would do fine too).

The only real problem comes with sectors that the hard drive’s decided are bad and remapped to other parts of the disk. Worst case is that these sectors are 512 bytes right in the middle of some ASCII/Unicode personally identifiable info. Hopefully, though, the drive was right about the sectors being bad, so they’re unreadable, or if not, from the middle of OS/app stuff, or a 512-byte chunk of a high res iris scan or photo that’s useless out of context. Either way it’d probably be more trouble than it was worth to pull a small amount of data out of the drive.

I agree the drives should go through a grinder, though. Hopefully they’ll do that once someone goes around and collects up the hardware. For the time being, though, this is a pretty good measure they’ve taken and quickly as well.

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