Re: Quick Survey: How do you "dispose" of outbound hard drives??

["Doty, Timothy T." <tdoty () MST EDU>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv
> [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Valdis Kletnieks
> Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2010 10:56 AM
> To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
> Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Quick Survey: How do you "dispose" of outbound
> hard drives??
>
> On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 09:32:40 MDT, "SCHALIP, MICHAEL" said:
>
> > ng white flash" arena, so I'd recommend AGAINST trying to apply those
> rules
> >  in this environment.
>
> My point was that the vast majority of what higher ed considers
> sensitive data
> isn't (in the greater scheme of things) any more sensitive than the
> "Sensitive
> But Unclassified" category on the DoD side, so trying any harder than
> that
> isn't worth the effort.

You are comparing DoD classification schemes with education and having
different needs they will necessarily classify things differently. I
originally wrote a lot more, but the short of it is that what is sensitive
and how depends on who is asking who. The world of DoD is *far* different
than education and it isn't necessarily a matter of greater vs lesser, it is
just very, very different. The relevance of an institution's data to
national security is largely irrelevant, what matters in the end is the
financial risk and from there determining fiscally appropriate mitigations.

It doesn't matter how DoD would rate it: different field, different
concerns.

When it comes to preventing data from being recovered from surplussed
hardware I'm of the camp "single overwrite is good enough". I find ATA
secure erase interesting because it has potentially less overhead than DBAN
(it appears faster allowing higher throughput of drives if that is a
concern) and better reliability (vs procedures in place to ensure that
interrupted wipes are actually completed). It has caveats, however, that
prevent it from being a drop-in replacement for DBAN.

Ultimately, each institution has to determine for themselves what their
mitigation strategy will be. Some may have external requirements preventing
physical destruction, others may find that easier and cheaper due to
particulars. Some may wipe with one tool, others with another. As long as
they understand the capabilities and risks of their method, all is well. (I
may still have a hard drive from a certain department of transportation that
had been "wiped" by installing DOS on the drive and then sold -- the "wipe"
had no real impact on the NTFS file system.) 

Tim Doty

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