RE: Wiping Solaris Servers

["MILES John M (LC)" <John.Miles () co lane or us>]

Why not just boot to a forensic distro like Helix or BackTrack and let "wipe" run for X passes, or do something like dd 
if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda && dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda . . .



-----Original Message-----
From: listbounce () securityfocus com
[mailto:listbounce () securityfocus com]On Behalf Of Bill Stout
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 9:39 AM
To: Levenglick, Jeff; Holstein, Robert - BLS CTR;
pen-test () securityfocus com
Subject: Re: Wiping Solaris Servers


I think pebbles of glass are equivalent to shredding, especially for a commercial environment.  Slamming a hard drive 
against pavement does meet the "so easy a monkey could perform the task" requirement.  Plus it's fun.

What I was inferring to was the value of the hard drives themselves, and if they needed to be included with the system. 
 It's faster and easier to verify a physically destroyed disk or just not ship it, than trust that a warehouse monkey 
run through a boot/wipe/verify process.  Does the warehouse have the right power connector?  Do they have the right 
keyboard and monitor?  Is the system complete or have all the parts needed to wipe the disk?  

Near-future or existing unknown recovery techniques might be able to recover from wiped disks.  For example, recorded 
encrypted conversations from 10 years ago (and newer) are easily decrypted these days, and back then the decryption 
techniques of the day were thought to take up to 30years.

Bill Stout

----- Original Message ----
From: "Levenglick, Jeff" <JLevenglick () fhlbatl com>
To: Bill Stout <billbrietstout () yahoo com>; "Holstein, Robert - BLS CTR" <Holstein.Robert () bls gov>; pen-test () 
securityfocus com
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 6:48:35 AM
Subject: RE: Wiping Solaris Servers

Bill,

Unless you open the drive, how do you know that all of the platters
broke? Heck, what if it broke into a few big parts that I crazy glued
back together and read data off the disk?

I am surprised that a government agency will allow you to do that in the
first place. (although this might explain why there are so many data
leaks)

-----Original Message-----
From: listbounce () securityfocus com [mailto:listbounce () securityfocus com]
On Behalf Of Bill Stout
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 10:36 PM
To: Holstein, Robert - BLS CTR; pen-test () securityfocus com
Subject: Re: Wiping Solaris Servers

Is the hard drive important?  When Google bought GreenBorder, they
removed and destroyed the hard drives, then called a recycler to pick up
the computers.

When I replace failing hard drives, I take them to the parking lot, and
throw them against the ground, hard.  The platters are made of glass in
later hard drives and will shatter, the drive will sound like it's full
of gravel.

Bill Stout

----- Original Message ----
From: "Holstein, Robert - BLS CTR" <Holstein.Robert () bls gov>
To: pen-test () securityfocus com
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2007 8:50:38 AM
Subject: Wiping Solaris Servers

Hey everyone, 

I need to find a method of securly wiping Solaris servers using the DOD
standard disk sanitization requirements. So far the only thing I have
come up with is customized bootable Solaris CD of some sort with bcwipe
on it.  There has got to be a better way.  Does anyone know of a
bootable (or other) solution that's a little less complicated.
Essentially we would need the end process to be so easy a monkey could
perform the task. 

Ideally, during the surplus phase a wharehouse employee would boot the
server up, run a simple command, and the server would be on its way...

Any assistance is apprecited. 

Regards, 
Bobby 



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