[terom]

Apparently with plaintext customer data.

> Lechelle said Scaleway worked with the YouTuber to recover the disk. The French-language video creator has written to Scaleway with assurances they have not copied the information contained on the disk. It is said some customer data was on the drive, unencrypted, including the source code and SSH keys of an Italian VPS provider.

[terom]

Based on links in the other hackernews thread, it was quick-formatted, but a filesystem containing qemu disk images was recovered: [1]

The YouTube video is in French without English CC subtitles, but there's screenshots of exploring what I assume would be one of the qcow images: [2]

* 03:59 `/root/.ssh` with SSH id_rsa (private) keys, (public) authorized_keys and (hashed) known_hosts

* 07:14 server binaries

* 08:42 server logs

* 12:59 AWS/S3 secret access keys

* 13:33 Source code... in QBASIC ?! must be very valuable legacy code :D

* 17:30 brute-forcing the ssh known_hosts

* etc

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/Micode/status/1395640486715662336

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf_cKTlOYLo

[TonyTrapp]

Note: QB64 (which is mentioned in the video) is a modern-day reimplementation of QBasic. It doesn't have to be legacy. Some people still prefer using Basic as their "scripting language" for quick tasks where other people would be using Python or JS these days.

[alyandon]

Although I never cared much for the language itself, I continued to write small programs in QB for many years because of its ability to produce an EXE file that ran in DOS and Windows without any dependencies.

[ChrisArchitect]

Other thread mentioned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27957471

[rasz]

>it was quick-formatted

are there OSes that perform quick format without issuing TRIM command to the SSD? TRIM would vanish the data in less than 15 minutes.

[djrogers]

Yes, 15 minutes is not 'quick' by most standards - quick formats take seconds, not minutes.

[rasz]

up to ~15 minutes is not the time it takes to quick format, its the number Iv seen during testing of TRIM, the time it took to internally erase translation table after format command.

There should be NO DATA on the drive if it was really formatted on OS supporting TRIM.

[fomine3]

I believe parted won't issue TRIM for whole disk/partition after erasing partition table or partition. Possibly mkfs.xfs issues TRIM? I don't know.

Anyway, what they should at least is just issue `blkdiscard /dev/sdb`, or betterly Secure Erase (on SATA) or Sanitize (on NVMe).