There is a point where every piece of mass storage has to go.
And that's what this episode is all about.
Data destruction.
Now you got to be careful because on the security plus you'll hear another term media sanitation for
me if I'm going to destroy the data on something.
I will also be sanitizing the media.
So to me these terms are synonymous.
Now we've got three levels of data destruction that I want to talk about.
The first one I want to talk about is cleary clearing simply means to use some internal command within
the mass storage device to make the data go away.
The most classic example of this would be running an erase command from the Command Prompt of a hard
drive to erase it on there.
Now we all know that simply running erase commands isn't enough.
There are studies that show that you can actually erase a hard drive up to seven times and still be
able to get the data.
Now I personally have never seen that.
However it might be an old wives tale but it does happen.
So pretty much today what we do more than anything else is we use wiping programs wiping programs will
begin at the very beginning of a drive and begin to write either all zeros or all ones or random ones
and zeros from the beginning of the drive to the end of the drive.
Therefore we are completely destroying the data.
The nice part about clear is clear means that you'll still be able to use the drive for something else
because the next level is what we call purge purge means to do something to the device externally to
make the data go away.
And probably one of the best examples of a purge is a degauss or a decal or is a machine with a really
strong magnetic field and you take your mass storage device and you put it in the degauss or for a certain
amount of time and when it comes out of the degauss or all of the data is destroyed however Perge also
means that the device is basically not useful anymore.
So once you run it through a degauss or you're gonna just throw it in the trash because it's no longer
any good.
Another example of a purge would be something like a crypto race.
In this case let's just say we've got a hard drive that's completely encrypted.
If we destroy the keys for that drive we are no longer able to access that data.
In essence we have purged the drive because it's completely useless.
Now granted we could wipe it but you have no access to the drive and the data is in essence destroyed
because it's not recoverable.
The last one and the most fun one is destroy.
Oh maybe I wasn't thinking about that type of destruction.
Now with destroy what we're talking about is to actually ruin the media in such a way that it is no
longer functional.
So probably this is thing to be careful about.
On the security plus and that is when we're talking about data destruction don't forget that life is
more than hard drives.
You can have paper media you can have tape media floppy disks.
So they think about all these things which may be dated but it's on the exam.
So when we're talking about destroying number one is burning.
That's right.
You can take paper and you can put your Bic lighter on there and burn it up.
That is a great way to destroy it.
And the media's completely ruined from that point on unless you can write on the ashes second.
And this is also with paper and that is pulping pulping simply means to take whatever paper you have
and soak it in water and grind it up a little bit turn it in a mush and it's absolutely useless.
But for most people when we're talking about destroying media we're talking about something a little
bit more exciting for example.
This is a shredded hard drive.
This has been run through a machine in such a way that it simply tears it apart shreds it into these
little very sharp little pieces that no one is ever going to be able to use.
The one level down from shredding is pulverising with pulverising.
We have another kind of machine that doesn't just shredded into pieces but actually grinds it down into
little teeny tiny individual pieces.
Trust me when you're talking about shredding or pulverising I'm pretty sure I agree.
We're never going to be able to use these devices again
in.