Re: Erase Files

[Chuck Yerkes <chuck+obsd@2003.snew.com>]

Quoting Mark (judas_iskario@web.de):
...
> And there is (in german) a newsline:
> http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/uma-06.09.03-002/
> Very short version: 2 persons robbed an hdd from the australian customs
> department with top secret data.
> 
> So I think it's importent to delete data as secure as we can.

They stole undeleted data as pointed out.

Have a friend who was stuck on pager duty.  Unix guy.  After the
5th page waking him up in the middle of the night for problems with
Windows boxes (not his problem, concern or care) he dug around and
found his TASER.

Held the taser to the pager and fired.  Not a mark.

Then he slept through the rest of the night.


After he came to work 3 or 4 times with "gee, my pager must have
broken, all I was getting were Windows pages anyway." they fixed
the paging setup.

So I recommend putting a TASER into your laptop aimed at your HD
and taking the charge yourself each time you open it to protect
the HD.  A theif won't know to take the 20kV himself and the drive
will be erased.

Easy.

Oh, and crypto graphic file systems might meet your needs.  Of
course they'd be unmounted when you walk away (perhaps trigger by
your bluetooth phone leaving range or your pulling out the iButton
that must remain in on the computer but is attached to you.


You can't easily protect against the stupid.  "top secret data".
(I love babelfish:  almost english:  http://tinyurl.com/mkqz)

I'd suggest that their whole security scheme fell apart. Your
notions of protecting the computers wouldn't help - they wouldn't
have turned on whatever you used.  Machines stolen from a secured
data center point to a failing in the data center security.


Now, you DO encrypt all your backup tapes (you have backup tapes
right?) You do encrypt the path your backups take from the computer
to the tapes if it's over a network (kerberized rsh or IPSec are
lovely).

And you keep the keys in a PGP encrypted file and someone else has
a secured copy of the keys if something happens to you.
(A friend once had to crack a word perfect doc of someone who has died).