Abandoned and still useful hard drives present a privacy and security problem

It is very normal that when swap a hard drive for an ssd or or a larger one, choose to destroy the previous one to get rid of it, hoping that if it is destroyed, the data will not be recovered. But it really is a security and privacy issue.

The Circular Drive Initiative have long wondered why people destroy hard drives when they're still good. The CDI is a collective of technology companies that have come together to fight for dying hard drives, wanting to reuse them to minimize electronic waste.

Old hard drives don't have to be destroyed

Companies participating in the CDI include Seagate, Western Digital, and Micron, as well as blockchain-focused network Chia Network. Their secretary and treasurer talked to IT Asset Disposition companies about how their company could collect and reuse some old drives from data centers, so they don't go to waste.

He commented that an ITAD supplier told him that they were destroying five million units for a single customer. He affirms that this decision is extreme and is not zero risk for the retired hard drives, since it is not exempt from failures. It turns out that there are more dangers lurking in those piles of crushed metal.

If we just throw away an old hard drive, leftover data could still be recovered by someone with the necessary knowledge. Add to that that a hacker could take a piece of a plate as small as 3mm, and get something like data out of it. With enough time and dedication, they could gather enough of a picture to demand some sort of ransom for not leaking sensitive photos or data.

The IEEE Standards Association has recently approved a long list of secure ways to permanently erase leftover data. The safe method is called purging. There are several ways to do this, but a simple one is to overwrite the data with new data patterns. It takes a while, but it's relatively easy. A cryptographic erasure would also work, it is a faster method, and it simply consists of erasing the encryption key so that data is incomprehensible to even the most advanced hacker.

Source: PC Gamer