hacked by the (alleged) `amazon-security' scammers

[Karl Auer]

On Sun, 2021-11-07 at 22:48 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
> It's important. It's totally pointless to scrub an SSD. Once it's
> rewritten, anything there is gone forever.

Not entirely. It doesn't hurt and even with levelling it will typically
poke large holes in the data on the disk. Personally I think that
passing on or selling a disk is not worth the risk - just hit it with a
very large hammer, de-gauss it or whatever and discard it. I would not
accept someone else's disks except for unimportant systems.

It's different if you will be re-using it yourself; and particularly
after malware. Then, as long as the boot sectors have been overwritten
with new clean boot information and all the malicious files have been
removed, there is no need to scrub a disk; operating system file
removal tools are fine.

> HDDs were _theoretically_ partially recoverable with $10 of thousands
> worth of expertise in a lab, 25-30 years ago. Modern ones? Forget it,
> but people still secure-delete them.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you are mistaken. I've recovered
thousands of files for people off modern hard disks. That's the risk
that people are trying to avoid by scrubbing - that deleted files are
resurrected, which is definitely possible and does not require
expensive tools.

As far as writing every sector 7 times or whatever though - that's
definitely pointless.

Regards, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer

GPG fingerprint: 61A0 99A9 8823 3A75 871E 5D90 BADB B237 260C 9C58
Old fingerprint: 2561 E9EC D868 E73C 8AF1 49CF EE50 4B1D CCA1 5170