I Shocked a Drive in Reno, Just to Watch it Die

In the movies, crafty computer wizards always have a self-destruct button somewhere on their computer’s desktop. Just click a button and POW, all their private data is erased, permanently and instantly removed from existance.

Back in the day, I had one too — a secret batch file named KILLME.BAT that, if ran, would have performed a quick format of all my computer’s hard drives. I had a copy of this batch file on my old BBS computer, ready to run at a moment’s notice. Should “the man” have shown up knocking on (or kicking in) my front door, the plan was to kick off the batch file, erasing both files off my hard drive and years off my sentence. In retrospect, my attempts at deleting electronic evidence would have been pretty pointless; even the most amateur forensic data tech can recover files from a quick format. The only way to really hide information through formatting is by writing over the drive multiple times with 1s and 0s, a process that takes hours to complete. Somehow, I doubt anyone willing to kick in my front door would have waited for such a task to complete.

Before the days of hard drives, data was stored on floppy disks. Obviously with data strewn across hundreds of floppies, mass deletion of data was more difficult. Enter the degausser.

A degausser is an electromagnet — a device that’s magnetic only when powered by electricity. Electromagnets can be safely stored nearby electronic media, as long as they’re not turned on. Magnetic media includes cassette tapes, video tapes, floppy disks and computer hard drives. Each of these devices stores its information using magnetised media; put any of them near a big enough magnet, and the data is erased.

Throughout the 80s and 90s I met more than one paranoid soul with a degausser sitting dangerously close to their collection of floppy disks. I don’t think any of these people were in any real danger of being raided, but had it happened, they would have been prepared — a flick of a switch, and bye bye data.

And unlike that old batch file that I had, a degausser would have certainly erased evidence in a hurry. Wiping a big magnet across a floppy disk doesn’t just erase the data — it scrambles its little mind. Think of it as a floppy disk lobotomy. In fact, I recently degaussed some old floppy disks here at work. As a test, I put one of those disks back into the computer to try and see if I could get any information off of it. Windows first said, “this disk is not formatted. Would you like me to format it?” When I said yes, Windows came back and said, “this floppy disk is unusable. Please insert another floppy disk.”

Of course with a degausser there are no second chances, so you had better be sure it’s the real deal before powering it on. I can only imagine the look on some poor soul’s face after hearing his front door being kicked in and wiping his entire disk collection, only to hear his wife yell moments later, “Sorry, hon! I forgot my keys!”

For most people, encryption has replaced those panic buttons. There are lots and lots of drive encryption programs out there today for under $100 that offer unbreakable drive encryption. Jetico’s BestCrypt (a program I played around with for quite a while) offers AES, Blowfish, CAST, GOST, RC-6, Serpent, and Twofish encryption algorithms. AES (256 bit) is what the NSA uses for anything ranked “TOP SECRET”. Of course the biggest problem with encryption is that to access the data you need a password. Whoever is kicking in your front door knows that you know the password, and there are lots of not very nice things they are likely to do to extract that password from you. I doubt many hackers would hold up long against a taser, rubber hose or waterboarding, but I doubt things would come to that. After they throw your wife in jail as being an accessory to a crime and toss your kids in a foster home for a couple of days, I suspect most of us would give that password up freely.

And then you have to think, why are people kicking your door in in the first place? If they already had enough evidence for a warrant, chances are they don’t need what’s lying around on your floppy disks to make or break their case — if anything, it was probably icing. Destroying evidence at that point probably won’t help your case.

For the degausser, there is no bargaining and no undoing. We have a giant desktop one here at work that I’m sure would scramble a PC in seconds flat. In fact, I may try that at some point, just to see how well it works.

This blog entry didn’t end up where I thought it would end when I started it.