dwyermJan 2020Strongly recommends
Highly recommended by me, too: Zoz at DefCon 23, entitled "And That's How I Lost My Other Eye...Explorations in Data Destruction" ▶ this video
in “BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop” · View on HN
DEF CON 23 - Zoz - And That's How I Lost My Other Eye...Explorations in Data Destruction (Fixed)
DEF CON 23 - Zoz - And That's How I Lost My Other Eye...Explorations in Data Destruction (Fixed) on HackerTube: recommended by 2 Hacker News commenters across 2 separate months, 2016–2022.
DEFCONConference
Open on YouTubetalk · evergreen
Zoz's DEF CON 23 talk explores practical, often explosive ways to destroy data and hard drives quickly. It tests methods such as thermite and other physical techniques for rapid destruction.
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it whenever hard drive destruction or fast physical data wiping comes up, as an empirical test of what actually works.
- people recommended it
- 2
- separate months
- 2
- strong recommendations
- 1
- discussed on HN
- 2016–2022
“Take a look at this talk from DEF CON 23 on what it takes to safely destroy HDDs”
What HN commenters said
5 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
open_bearAug 2016Recommends
Take a look at this talk from DEF CON 23 on what it takes to safely destroy HDDs (spoiler: even explosions don't quite cut it): ▶ this video
in “WhatsApp is going to share your phone number with Facebook” · View on HN
pvillanoMay 2022Cites it
there was a defcon talk where they tested multiple methods for rapid hard drive erasure, in the event of a raid on a data center. a bomb range they visited happened to have a few of these leftover and ▶ this video
in “Shaped Charges – Sheet of copper going through 1ft of solid steel (2010) [video]” · View on HN
magnatDec 2017Cites it
Hard disks are surprisingly hard to destroy on-demand. There was a DEF CON 23 talk [1] exploring ways to quickly wipe your servers in situ using physical methods. [1] ▶ this video
in “Can I erase sensitive data on an old hard drive with Neodymium Magnets?” · View on HN
jfindleyJan 2016Cites it
There was an interesting experiment done on this at a DEFCON a few years back[1]. Thermite, even the more explosive copper-based variant, is pretty poor at destroying disk platters, sadly. Explosives or cutting equipment seem to be better, although the magnitude of the engineering challenge obviously increases. 1: ▶ this video
in “Android Full Disk Encryption Cold Boot Attack (2012)” · View on HN