DEF CON 23 - Zoz - And That's How I Lost My Other Eye...Explorations in Data Destruction (Fixed)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it whenever hard drive destruction or fast physical data wiping comes up, as an empirical test of what actually works.
What it is
Zoz's DEF CON 23 talk explores practical, often explosive ways to destroy data and hard drives quickly. It tests methods such as thermite and other physical techniques for rapid destruction.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2016 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec dwyerm · 2020-01 · on “BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop”
Highly recommended by me, too: Zoz at DefCon 23, entitled "And That's How I Lost My Other Eye...Explorations in Data Destruction" [this video]
Recommends open_bear · 2016-08 · on “WhatsApp is going to share your phone number with Facebook”
Take a look at this talk from DEF CON 23 on what it takes to safely destroy HDDs (spoiler: even explosions don't quite cut it): [this video]
Cites jfindley · 2016-01 · on “Android Full Disk Encryption Cold Boot Attack (2012)”
There was an interesting experiment done on this at a DEFCON a few years back[1]. Thermite, even the more explosive copper-based variant, is pretty poor at destroying disk platters, sadly. Explosives or cutting equipment seem to be better, although the magnitude of the engineering challenge obviously increases. 1: [this video]
Cites magnat · 2017-12 · on “Can I erase sensitive data on an old hard drive with Neodymium Magnets?”
Hard disks are surprisingly hard to destroy on-demand. There was a DEF CON 23 talk [1] exploring ways to quickly wipe your servers in situ using physical methods. [1] [this video]
Cites pvillano · 2022-05 · on “Shaped Charges – Sheet of copper going through 1ft of solid steel (2010) [video]”
there was a defcon talk where they tested multiple methods for rapid hard drive erasure, in the event of a raid on a data center. a bomb range they visited happened to have a few of these leftover and [this video]