Re: Stealthier Internet access

[Marsh Ray <marsh () extendedsubset com>]

On 5/25/2010 5:01 PM, Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu wrote:
> It's not worth worrying about wiping the remapped sectors on a disk - even an
> older 40G drive has some 80 million sectors on it - so even if you have a few
> hundred sectors that have remapped due to I/O errors, it's still literally
> a one-in-a-million shot that anything incriminating is in the sector.

Not if the entire drive has been filled with confidential data, e.g., a
medical records server. You could end up with quite a few names and SSNs
in those few hundred bad sectors.

Probably enough to trigger the reporting obligations of a "data breach"
if you're under that kind of regulations. You might not even have
control of the drive any more so in the worst case you end up having to
notify to everyone who could have ended up on the drive, wiped or not.

Now that's what I call a bad sector!

> Plus
> it's a *bad* sector, so reading and recovering the data is a bitch...

Or it could be trivial with the right software and/or simple hardware.

- Marsh

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