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by PaulKeeble 1110 days ago
There have been multiple challenges on hard drives with substantial reward offered for anyone able to take a basic formatted drive with a few MB of files that were overwritten with 0s and recovering the files. Not once did any company accept the challenge let alone complete it. Every data recovery company would tell you that is not possible.

Today we have secure erase which is necessary to clear SSDs and I doubt there is any actual technology to recover from thia mechanism. A lot of hysteria has been shown around drive clearing in the standards and until the standards reflect the reality of what is really possible and what is really sufficient I can not see companies changing.
4 comments
hospitalJail 1110 days ago
>Not once did any company accept the challenge let alone complete it.

Do remember that winning award is significantly less profitable than selling your secrets to the military.

NSO Group makes more money hacking iphones, than they make on bug bounties.

(but also I agree with you on the formatting our drives)

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AnotherGoodName 1110 days ago
Secure erase works well. Every other process we have around it has too much room for human error to creep in. From misconfigured drive encryption to a hdd making it to the erased pile without being erased.

Just shred it. You can't mistake a shredded drive for a non shredded drive. The margin for human error is much smaller.

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akvadrako 1110 days ago
> Today we have secure erase which is necessary to clear SSDs and I doubt there is any actual technology to recover from thia mechanism.

You might doubt it, but you also cannot provide much evidence against it. Trim commands just tell the controller to erase data – what they actually do internally isn't easy to discover without a major operation and internal knowledge.

The best bet is not trusting the drives at all, perhaps by storing only encrypted data, then throwing away the key.

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hospitalJail 1110 days ago
>Not once did any company accept the challenge let alone complete it.

Do remember that winning award is significantly less profitable than selling your secrets to the military.

NSO Group makes more money hacking iphones, than they make on bug bounties.

link