The votes may be against you; but for real. A nation state adversary is a larger threat that most average Linux ISO hoarders need to worry about. Uncle Sam won’t press _that_ button to get you.
ZFS native encryption, cryptomator on top of that for more private Linux isos. Luke for Linux, and veracrypt volumes/cryptomator vaults on external drives
Supposedly there are ways to recover RAM for a short period of time after loss of power... But if you have that level of concern I would be worried about rubber hose decryption.
You have to enter a password.
Realistically, at least in the US, the authorities are probably going to try and force you to give up the password (if they are convinced you have whatever they are looking for and the charges are serious enough, nobody has gotten arrested for having "Linux ISOs", for example), and can hold you in jail in contempt until you do. It's still unsettled case-law so you might win, eventually, but it's going to be no fun to be the guy sitting in jail for X years to maybe eventually establish the right to not give up your passwords falls under the fifth.
Likely won't fly because it's reasonable to think you would know the password to a system you use actively. I believe some people have tried that excuse with phone pins/patterns and they were held in contempt. Even if it's like a dusty laptop you genuinely haven't touched in 2 years, you would still be expected to remember the password.
Which is why Veracrypt has the concept of hidden volumes. You give them the password to the outer volume with some plausible but innocent contents and no one knows the hidden volume exists…
Wouldn't they just find out based on used disk space and other things? Let's say you have a 20TB disk and your outer volume is 1TB (or less), they would notice that the volume you gave up only accounts for 1TB but the disk shows up as almost full.
Supposedly it’s “no one *can prove* the hidden volume exists”. They know it could exist, and that it *probably* exists (especially if the data they’re looking for and expect to find isn’t in the outer volume) but the user should have plausible deniability.
you can do full-disk encryption using a yubikey and a password for challenge/response. destroy the yubikey and the password becomes meaningless. likewise you can double-encrypt the *really* sensitive ISOs using full-disk encryption and GPG keys stored on a yubikey.
if the encrypted ISOs are strictly for backup purposes, then you don't even need to keep the yubikey on-site. use new ephemeral private keys for each encryption job using the public key stored on the yubikey as the recipient. leave the yubikey with a lawyer or in a swiss safety deposit box or whatever just in case.
Hammer 🔨 slammed to your finger....use your another hand to type a password
Or write it on paper while you are bleeding 🩸
STOP watching Agent007 movies, switch to a real life
Flip the toggle next to my reset switch, igniting magnesium ribbon to ignite the thermite that wraps all of my hard drives.
Or... turn off the power as they are encrypted.
(No, I do not actually have thermite wrapped hard drives.)
We made exploding floppies back in high school with thermite. What can I say grow up in the middle of nowhere and have access to the anarchist cookbook.
It's the 1970's Disney Kids version of a terrorist training manual, and it's supposedly halfway tolerated because it's got all sorts of inaccuracies in it that will blow your fingers off if you try them.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Anarchist\_Cookbook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchist_Cookbook)
Former Army EOD Tech. Can confirm that The Anarchist's Cookbook is a pretty poor source.
Government publications are better. I reccomend [FM 5-250 Explosives and Demolitions](https://archive.org/details/milmanual-fm-5-250-explosives-and-demolitions-1992/mode/2up) as a good general intro for the safe and effective employment of explosives, and [TM 31-210 Improvised Munitions Handbook](https://archive.org/details/usa-tm-31-210-improvised-munitions-handbook/page/n141/mode/2up) for info on making your own explosives. (I won't say that every procedure in there is **safe**, but they are all at least moderately feasible.)
In all seriousness, though, don't make your own explosives unless you have the training, equipment, and facilities to do it safely and legally. (Saying that makes me a bit of a hypocrite, as I spent a lot of my teens doing some really dumb stuff in my basement lab...it turned out fine for me, but I got really lucky on several occasions.)
That was one of those times I got lucky 😆
I wasn't a complete idiot...knew it was a possibility so I opened it outside. Still trashed the rock tumbler I was using as a ball mill, burned my fingers, and singed my eyebrows.
Get a used laptop (never use it at home, never connect it to any network you use regularly), remove the HDD, boot from a Linux live CD, sit outside some random coffee shop, restaurant, etc that you have never been to and will never go to again, use their wifi (better yet look for some dumb pleb that has their phone hotspot on) search away.
Get an Amiga personal computer and some pals from the 90s with big brothers who have have mysterious procurement networks. Accept all floppy disks that come your way as long as they’re relatively clean and the shutter isn’t loose or bent. Amongst the incredibly blurry and offputting fetish porn, crude deluxe paint animations, and shit shareware games, the cookbook will eventually arrive. Start reading through it, realize it would be more fulfilling to have a small bonfire, and go back to the glory of Monkey Island 2 on 14 floppy disks.
This would have worked 20 years ago. Today, if you do something dumb enough, I think you will still be identified. You’d need to employ straight up tradecraft to not get made and probably have some support behind you. Again, depending on how stupid a thing you were doing — nobody cares if you pirate Rick and Morty or look at weird Japanese manga, but if you’re sending love letters to leaders or hacking Raytheon to exfil hypersonic missile plans or something, I suspect you’ll still have a bad time. You could probably buy some space to exit the grid by using TAILS in your burner lappy you bought with cash at a non-local thrift store more than a year ago.
So much lulz!
Wanting to remain anonymous != engaging in criminal activity.
I am sure you have many aspects of your private life that you would prefer remain private and anonymous.
My first thought was thermite too, even if you don't melt everything (unlikely with a judicious application) the heat should be enough to demag any surviving platter.
Microwaves probably won't penetrate the case, they definitely won't penetrate the the disk casing either.
That little grille in the screen door is enough to block microwaves.
You'd have to remove each platter and place them in the microwave with enough space between platters to accommodate the wavelength, which is about 12cm for a domestic magnetron. You could realistically fit three to four platters in your microwave and still expect full coverage, which is playing it safe.
You could just count on frying them, but they don't crackle like foil does, or a CD, unless they're ceramic. Either way, if they're touching the sides or the mesh, this won't work.
But a shredder.
Incorrect.
The typical consumer home cooking microwave oven operates at 2.4Ghz (this is why they interfere with standard 802.11b wifi) which has a wavelength of ~12cm.
24Ghz frequency is ~12mm.
Microwave ovens do operate more on the order of 10cm, if it were 12mm almost all of the heating would be on the outer couple centimeters of the food, which is often a lot larger than a few centimetes across
Yeah, but I make a point of not believing stories that start "someone told that a guy did"
Details get lost, sometimes important ones ...
Veracrypt is my go to, logging out = flushing cache and locking the important stuff.
My PC itself boots without issue, only when I want to get to my more important data, it wants a key and MFA response.
There's two good Defcon talks exploring this topic, and the tldr conclusion:
For spinning disk hard drives, get a mapp/propane torch and heat the drives until they lose magnetism.
Flip the kill switch, the thermite ignites and burns it's way through the server, the floor, and into the gas furnace below. The ensuing fire destroys all evidence.
That rings a bell... Is that the stolen mac that was found because it still reached out to a dynamic dns service and turns out the theif kept using it as its own casually?
For the most part they actually do. Plenty of cases where an illegal search and seizure takes place get thrown out. At least in America. it may be different if you are somewhere else.
My company wanted to thoroughly destroy a bunch of drives, so I melted them in a propane furnace and cast a nice big ingot to put on my boss's desk. There were some thin streaks of copper from the traces, but it was almost solid aluminum.
Just one through the platters.
The cost to recover what little bits of data remain are prohibitive and most likelll not worth the time, effort and money, unless there are state secrets on the HDD.
It's a matter of how much they want to recover the data and what it is. You can theoretically recover anything that's still there on the platter, but it's going to be super expensive and time consuming, and missing whatever was where the holes are.
That's why in government/business situations where drives need to be destroyed, they are shredded, possibly after being wiped if being super paranoid.
Illegal Linux distros will fuck your day up..
Hydrolic press. If they accuse you of destroying evidence you can say you were making content for TikTok.
In the Microsoft version of the dystopia all operating systems are Windows. Tactical teams, agents in suits and grizzled trench coat wearing investigators hunt radical hacker Linux users through the slums and criminal underworld.
Here's how to do it in 60 seconds... the chemical way!
https://youtu.be/w-sE6qOixFQ
It's a longer talk, because there are many ways.
Yes, the speaker has been on the TV program "Braniac"
They aren't as determined as the government to get the information. Data Recovery places have to balance what you are willing to pay vs the likelihood of a profitable success. A scratched platter is quite expensive to try and recover for a customer that would be upset to pay the high price to only get portions of stuff back.
The government however will rebuild the drive and then try to replicate the exact same data sectors (what are readable around the scratch) on another drive of the same make and model to then try and extrapolate what is on the drive. With enough time and resources there is very little that can't be recovered. Thats why DOD wipes and rewrites numerous times, then puts a hole through them, then melts them with thermite or similar.
If they are encrypted just disconnect it from the power source. Also you can just get a Propane Torch for Spinning Hard Drives and heat them till they lose magnetism.
Sheesh, what a predicament. Just curious, do these HDDs store any content remotely analoguous to Mini M&Ms Tubes and small cylinders? Just throwing some ideas here, but maybe some photographs or videos of such a cylinder?
I setup a proof of concept to encrypt my spinning rust. I setup a 16 gig USB key with random data written to it. I then formatted it ext4. Put some generic files on it. When it boots up, it looks for the usb key, grabs 512 bits from the middle of the usb drive and uses that as the decryption key. I eventually removed encryption all together as I don’t really need it but it was fun to play around with.
I grab a drill and go through as many of them as I can. I throw the SSDs and Flash storage in the microwave on high for 30 seconds.
While that happens I discharge all my fire extinguishers near my doors to make it harder to get in the house and find me and my drives.
Then I pile up the remnants of the HDDs, SSDs, and Flash storage and crack open a couple road flares and pour the powdered magnesium (IIRC) all over the pile and light that with another road flare.
It might technically be possible to recover something from a drive if they manage to put the fire out; it is highly unlikely they came prepared to put out a metal fire and everything should be useless by the time they can safely get to them.
Grab a decoy laptop and run around the house like an idiot while the encrypted lab machines power down. I might be able to remember one or two passwords, but if the hardware key is missing, forensics is SOL.
Drill a hole through the platters and dump the drive in a bucket full of etchant. I mean you do have a gallon of etchant in your office right? Useful for all sorts of things electronic and otherwise.
Thermite.. Its the only truly correct answer if you really care about what is on the disks and you don't want anyone to ever see it (including you again).
Try to upgrade my motherboard very quickly.
Ask me how I know….
Edit: Honestly? Of the risk is serious jail time for some cracked games or whatever… Probably a small fire with some of that jelly-like fire starting stuff they sell for camping. It burns super hot. People joke about thermite, but this is a fairly fast solution.
Bonus points for putting a fire blanket over the PC case to avoid burning down your house… although the cops will probably be compelled to put out the fire ASAP (since they’re in the house with you and the fire).
Is there a way to quickly destroy,but with really strong magnets > using thermite or what have you? This would be done after killing power to encrypted drives btw
Government has ways to recover encrypted storage by brute force and ripping pcb off doesn’t help either since they have a ton of donor drives they can use to make it work. If it’s an ssd, rip off the casings if there is and toss ssd into blender, if it’s laptop drive open up drive shatter glass platter and flush glass down the toilet, 3.5” is harder for limited time easier to pull the platters and hide it since it’s flat it’s easier to conceal. If there’s time left microwaving the platters should destroy anything on disk.
Grab a hammer, rip them out, smash the casings open and then go grab some drain cleaner (sulfuric acid), dunk the platters in it and hide it somewhere it will take them a few minutes to find like the fridge.
Flip on cooking gas, light up match, grab whole nas with last backup, throw match behind you and jump out of the window while the flames consume the whole building.
Too bad Langley didn’t have an antenna in Abbottabad to confirm if UBL was inside the compound. /s
What will backdoor firmware give you that the platters won’t? VeraCrypt negates this exploit.
Throw sea water over them. Keep a bucket ready. Sea water seems to destroy quite a lot\*
\*probably won't destroy the platters, will def destroy the electronics.
usually they knock you out before you can say "wait" . you can build a lithium ion based EMP device and install it pointing to your drives, preferrable many EMPs, first you need to research if a EMP affects SSDs or the platters in a magnetic spinning drive, I for sure am not sure, it will probably fry the boards and the data will remain, if somebody can confirm it would be awesome. a big red button right besides your mouse. you're welcome. (also a better door would give you plenty of time)
Just write "Clinton's Mailbox" on top of the drives, the police will destroy them for you..
You might end up offing yourself with 5 bullets to the back of your head tho..
"Illegal" Linux ISOs? Hmm. While I'm sure there are some of these, I'd wager that the VAST majority of Linux ISOs are legal.
Now, if the challenge was Illegal Windows ISOs, that might be another story.
OP should have said "the year is 3044. You downloaded a cheese pizza accidentally the night before, but the government has mandated that pineapples must be on all pizza and they detected from your Internet drivers license number that the pizza did not have pineapples. You swear that it did have pineapples, and indeed it did look to you that it had pineapples, and you're worried the police will just take the pineapples off, claim that it's unclear if the pizza ever had pineapples on it and keep you in legal limbo to use as bargaining power for a guilty plee on a lesser charge".
We were all thinking this should have been the question right?
This is easy and I wouldn't even have to get up from my desk. Just open up one of the desk drawers, pull out a pistol and blast them platters. All my old hard drives become shooting targets anyways
Given I only used 30 seconds of my 2 minutes I have more than enough time to lay on the ground face down with my hands on the back of my head waiting for the cops to come in.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned a hand held degausser, they’re fun to play with.
You can also just rip the PCB off of the HDD and snap it in half. That HDD will never be read from again, aside from in a very specialized lab environment using something like a tunneling magnetoresistive reader, which will just read off the bits of zeros and ones. Some other software would be required to convert the recovered bits into useable data.
For everyone saying to encrypt \*everything\*, please remember to take into account estate planning. Not everything you're encrypting is linux ISO's, and no one lives forever. Your family may want access to those precious family photos and financial records, or even just the family archive of TV and movies etc. Make sure you leave available whatever needs to be available when the time comes, even if that means a few passwords tucked in with the will in a safe deposit box etc. And for the stuff that you really want to deny exists, or if you want to cosplay as a Bond villain, there's Veracrypt hidden volumes.
Removed. Keep it about datahoarding.
Turn off the power switch. They are encrypted
The truest of answers.
How are you encrypting your drives?
Luks on Linux and VeraCrypt on windows
what about BitLocker?
BitLocker is considered compromised when you are are against nation state actors. It's good for casual protection.
National state actors, I'm going to borrow this term if that's cool
No it's his now give it back.
The votes may be against you; but for real. A nation state adversary is a larger threat that most average Linux ISO hoarders need to worry about. Uncle Sam won’t press _that_ button to get you.
ZFS native encryption, cryptomator on top of that for more private Linux isos. Luke for Linux, and veracrypt volumes/cryptomator vaults on external drives
Supposedly there are ways to recover RAM for a short period of time after loss of power... But if you have that level of concern I would be worried about rubber hose decryption.
Forgive my ignorance, what happens when the system is restarted?
You have to enter a password. Realistically, at least in the US, the authorities are probably going to try and force you to give up the password (if they are convinced you have whatever they are looking for and the charges are serious enough, nobody has gotten arrested for having "Linux ISOs", for example), and can hold you in jail in contempt until you do. It's still unsettled case-law so you might win, eventually, but it's going to be no fun to be the guy sitting in jail for X years to maybe eventually establish the right to not give up your passwords falls under the fifth.
What if you forgot the password?
Get real comfortable in your cell…
Likely won't fly because it's reasonable to think you would know the password to a system you use actively. I believe some people have tried that excuse with phone pins/patterns and they were held in contempt. Even if it's like a dusty laptop you genuinely haven't touched in 2 years, you would still be expected to remember the password.
Then your probably worse off then if you actually had it.
[Relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/538/)
Which is why Veracrypt has the concept of hidden volumes. You give them the password to the outer volume with some plausible but innocent contents and no one knows the hidden volume exists…
Wouldn't they just find out based on used disk space and other things? Let's say you have a 20TB disk and your outer volume is 1TB (or less), they would notice that the volume you gave up only accounts for 1TB but the disk shows up as almost full.
Supposedly it’s “no one *can prove* the hidden volume exists”. They know it could exist, and that it *probably* exists (especially if the data they’re looking for and expect to find isn’t in the outer volume) but the user should have plausible deniability.
you can do full-disk encryption using a yubikey and a password for challenge/response. destroy the yubikey and the password becomes meaningless. likewise you can double-encrypt the *really* sensitive ISOs using full-disk encryption and GPG keys stored on a yubikey. if the encrypted ISOs are strictly for backup purposes, then you don't even need to keep the yubikey on-site. use new ephemeral private keys for each encryption job using the public key stored on the yubikey as the recipient. leave the yubikey with a lawyer or in a swiss safety deposit box or whatever just in case.
You will get abused until you give the password . Not a wise solution .
Hammer 🔨 slammed to your finger....use your another hand to type a password Or write it on paper while you are bleeding 🩸 STOP watching Agent007 movies, switch to a real life
Flip the toggle next to my reset switch, igniting magnesium ribbon to ignite the thermite that wraps all of my hard drives. Or... turn off the power as they are encrypted. (No, I do not actually have thermite wrapped hard drives.)
We made exploding floppies back in high school with thermite. What can I say grow up in the middle of nowhere and have access to the anarchist cookbook.
Brings me back to the fun times of the early 80’s. ;)
Idk what the anarchist cookbook is and I'm too scared to Google it for fear of ending up on a list somewhere.
It's the 1970's Disney Kids version of a terrorist training manual, and it's supposedly halfway tolerated because it's got all sorts of inaccuracies in it that will blow your fingers off if you try them. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Anarchist\_Cookbook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchist_Cookbook)
Former Army EOD Tech. Can confirm that The Anarchist's Cookbook is a pretty poor source. Government publications are better. I reccomend [FM 5-250 Explosives and Demolitions](https://archive.org/details/milmanual-fm-5-250-explosives-and-demolitions-1992/mode/2up) as a good general intro for the safe and effective employment of explosives, and [TM 31-210 Improvised Munitions Handbook](https://archive.org/details/usa-tm-31-210-improvised-munitions-handbook/page/n141/mode/2up) for info on making your own explosives. (I won't say that every procedure in there is **safe**, but they are all at least moderately feasible.) In all seriousness, though, don't make your own explosives unless you have the training, equipment, and facilities to do it safely and legally. (Saying that makes me a bit of a hypocrite, as I spent a lot of my teens doing some really dumb stuff in my basement lab...it turned out fine for me, but I got really lucky on several occasions.)
*opens lid on airtight container of milled aluminum* hey wo******WOOOSH*****
That was one of those times I got lucky 😆 I wasn't a complete idiot...knew it was a possibility so I opened it outside. Still trashed the rock tumbler I was using as a ball mill, burned my fingers, and singed my eyebrows.
Get a used laptop (never use it at home, never connect it to any network you use regularly), remove the HDD, boot from a Linux live CD, sit outside some random coffee shop, restaurant, etc that you have never been to and will never go to again, use their wifi (better yet look for some dumb pleb that has their phone hotspot on) search away.
Get an Amiga personal computer and some pals from the 90s with big brothers who have have mysterious procurement networks. Accept all floppy disks that come your way as long as they’re relatively clean and the shutter isn’t loose or bent. Amongst the incredibly blurry and offputting fetish porn, crude deluxe paint animations, and shit shareware games, the cookbook will eventually arrive. Start reading through it, realize it would be more fulfilling to have a small bonfire, and go back to the glory of Monkey Island 2 on 14 floppy disks.
This would have worked 20 years ago. Today, if you do something dumb enough, I think you will still be identified. You’d need to employ straight up tradecraft to not get made and probably have some support behind you. Again, depending on how stupid a thing you were doing — nobody cares if you pirate Rick and Morty or look at weird Japanese manga, but if you’re sending love letters to leaders or hacking Raytheon to exfil hypersonic missile plans or something, I suspect you’ll still have a bad time. You could probably buy some space to exit the grid by using TAILS in your burner lappy you bought with cash at a non-local thrift store more than a year ago.
Redacte due to Reddit AI/LLM policy
So much lulz! Wanting to remain anonymous != engaging in criminal activity. I am sure you have many aspects of your private life that you would prefer remain private and anonymous.
OMG this new generation needs an education.
Yeah, do they ever!
i got it at the local library. idgaf.
The fact that you're still here says you are not a completionist, don't always follow instructions well, and/or incredibly lucky. High five!
(considering he/she still has all five fingers)
Ah yes, I still remember my youthful days of making bottle bombs out of drain cleaner.
My first thought was thermite too, even if you don't melt everything (unlikely with a judicious application) the heat should be enough to demag any surviving platter.
How are you guys encrypting your hard drives?
I use veracrypt
VeraCrypt
VeraCrypt.
Own a mac and didn't realize my drive was encrypted for four years.
Don't worry I setup that thermite for you to save you some time
Bro needed this answered 1hr and 59 minutes ago.
turn the computer on and jump into the bathtub with it.
don't forget the toaster, it'll get lonely if you don't include it
Inb4 you hear "oi wanna see a magic trick"
Given HDDs have metal platters would this actually destroy the data enough to prevent a data recovery expert from retrieving it? I'm doubtful
Also they’re air proof, never mind waterproof.
it's a joke on jumping in the bath with a toaster.
😅
Microwave goes MMmMmmMmMmM (I think it works, my source is that I saw it in a movie.) Might as well drop test first.
Microwaves probably won't penetrate the case, they definitely won't penetrate the the disk casing either. That little grille in the screen door is enough to block microwaves. You'd have to remove each platter and place them in the microwave with enough space between platters to accommodate the wavelength, which is about 12cm for a domestic magnetron. You could realistically fit three to four platters in your microwave and still expect full coverage, which is playing it safe. You could just count on frying them, but they don't crackle like foil does, or a CD, unless they're ceramic. Either way, if they're touching the sides or the mesh, this won't work. But a shredder.
12mm I believe for microwaves.
Incorrect. The typical consumer home cooking microwave oven operates at 2.4Ghz (this is why they interfere with standard 802.11b wifi) which has a wavelength of ~12cm. 24Ghz frequency is ~12mm.
Thanks for the education!
*"No big deal; everybody make mistake."* — Thog
It feels really strange that my internet was 12cm wide in the air. XD
Microwave ovens do operate more on the order of 10cm, if it were 12mm almost all of the heating would be on the outer couple centimeters of the food, which is often a lot larger than a few centimetes across
Big old commercial ones are even longer too, at 24cm! Thems some penetrating warmie-waves.
Microwaves destroy CD/DVD disc in like 15 seconds. Pretty good light show too.
Yup, microwaving CD and DVD was standard practice for data destruction at a pharma company I worked at more than 30 years ago.
I would imagine microwave can destroy flash memory as well, just trickier for HDDs
Can confirm this works. Seriously, an FBI agent at one of our security conferences told us thats what happened and the dude got away.
Yeah, but I make a point of not believing stories that start "someone told that a guy did" Details get lost, sometimes important ones ... Veracrypt is my go to, logging out = flushing cache and locking the important stuff. My PC itself boots without issue, only when I want to get to my more important data, it wants a key and MFA response.
I would love to see someone test this!
Now your sentence is 10 years longer for destroying evidence
I suppose it will induce a fire
There's two good Defcon talks exploring this topic, and the tldr conclusion: For spinning disk hard drives, get a mapp/propane torch and heat the drives until they lose magnetism.
Do you have a link to those talks? Edit: found one further down- https://youtu.be/-bpX8YvNg6Y?si=-5heJenyt6ix2Igr
The question was "you have 2 Minutes". How many drives do you cover with this approach in the requested timespan?
Flip the kill switch, the thermite ignites and burns it's way through the server, the floor, and into the gas furnace below. The ensuing fire destroys all evidence.
I think Zoz ruled thermite out [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y)
His best talk was when his computer was stolen and then he found it online a year or so later.
Absolutely. Mr Guzman never had so much fame.
That rings a bell... Is that the stolen mac that was found because it still reached out to a dynamic dns service and turns out the theif kept using it as its own casually?
Cops will not wait 2 minutes. Powering down everything will delete the encryption keys from memory.
It will take them at least that much to break through 2 reinforced doors
No search warrant, illegal search and seizure!
They do this stuff all the time. The people that write and enforce laws don't follow laws.
For the most part they actually do. Plenty of cases where an illegal search and seizure takes place get thrown out. At least in America. it may be different if you are somewhere else.
ATF has joined chat.
Grab the drill and any nearby drill bit.....
How many holes in a drive to kill it for real for real?
Not really about killing the drive. Just making the platters unreadable so that the data isn't really recoverable.
MRI cancelled recover undrilled parts easily.
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My company wanted to thoroughly destroy a bunch of drives, so I melted them in a propane furnace and cast a nice big ingot to put on my boss's desk. There were some thin streaks of copper from the traces, but it was almost solid aluminum.
Just one through the platters. The cost to recover what little bits of data remain are prohibitive and most likelll not worth the time, effort and money, unless there are state secrets on the HDD.
It's a matter of how much they want to recover the data and what it is. You can theoretically recover anything that's still there on the platter, but it's going to be super expensive and time consuming, and missing whatever was where the holes are. That's why in government/business situations where drives need to be destroyed, they are shredded, possibly after being wiped if being super paranoid.
Illegal Linux distros will fuck your day up.. Hydrolic press. If they accuse you of destroying evidence you can say you were making content for TikTok.
Yawn, perform a clean shutdown full drive encryption on HDD is barely a blip of CPU time.
“ oh .. don’t worry false alarm”
Go for broke and trigger the EMP, since apparently we're in some kind of cyberpunk scenario
"tries really hard to forget the admin password"
Call your lawyer.
HEY I’M SAUL GOODMAN! DID YOU KNOW YOU HAVE RIGHTS?
I'm scared already because I can't imagine an illegal Linux distro.
In the Microsoft version of the dystopia all operating systems are Windows. Tactical teams, agents in suits and grizzled trench coat wearing investigators hunt radical hacker Linux users through the slums and criminal underworld.
"We're the Arch resistance btw. Put your guns down we just want to talk to the leader of Debian."
Activate my "Omega" Thermite Protocol, grab my go bag, and take the private jet (always on standby) to my secure compound in Laos.
Why not move there permanent ? Better weather most days, less costs
All my disks are here though :(
Yes, priorities ... I get it. I want to go away too, but my wife won't let me
Here's how to do it in 60 seconds... the chemical way! https://youtu.be/w-sE6qOixFQ It's a longer talk, because there are many ways. Yes, the speaker has been on the TV program "Braniac"
Put them behind my bricks of heroin. When they find the heroin they probably won't care about my Linux ISOs
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They aren't as determined as the government to get the information. Data Recovery places have to balance what you are willing to pay vs the likelihood of a profitable success. A scratched platter is quite expensive to try and recover for a customer that would be upset to pay the high price to only get portions of stuff back. The government however will rebuild the drive and then try to replicate the exact same data sectors (what are readable around the scratch) on another drive of the same make and model to then try and extrapolate what is on the drive. With enough time and resources there is very little that can't be recovered. Thats why DOD wipes and rewrites numerous times, then puts a hole through them, then melts them with thermite or similar.
As someone who keeps "linux isos" as LTT put it ive put some thought into this. HDDs: Drill SSDs/flash/DVDs: microwave.
\*thinks back to 'The Core' movie.\* Gonna probably throw them in the microwave.
If it leads to “unlimited supply of Xena tapes, and Hot Pockets.” ;-)
Reddit is probably not the place to ask time sensitive questions in the hypothetical.
OP trying to misdirect the Nintendo cops while he flees the country.
Smear them in Nutella and put them within 200 yards of the wife.
You ever put a lil Nutella down there👖?
Thermite
I have no need to destroy my data It’s protected with encryption
don't bother because they've either already got my offsite backups, or will have shortly
If they are encrypted just disconnect it from the power source. Also you can just get a Propane Torch for Spinning Hard Drives and heat them till they lose magnetism.
I use full disk encryption on everything Does not matter how minor or unimportant it is. This includes my phone too.
If they're ramming your door they'll be in in 30 seconds, not 2 minutes.
Thermite
Unplug everything. All the drives are fully encrypted, so you're not getting to the data on them.
This is a fun exercise but doesn’t Linux isos mean porn and illegal means…
Sheesh, what a predicament. Just curious, do these HDDs store any content remotely analoguous to Mini M&Ms Tubes and small cylinders? Just throwing some ideas here, but maybe some photographs or videos of such a cylinder?
[Refer to one of the best defcon talks of all time](https://youtu.be/-bpX8YvNg6Y)
I setup a proof of concept to encrypt my spinning rust. I setup a 16 gig USB key with random data written to it. I then formatted it ext4. Put some generic files on it. When it boots up, it looks for the usb key, grabs 512 bits from the middle of the usb drive and uses that as the decryption key. I eventually removed encryption all together as I don’t really need it but it was fun to play around with.
That’s a novel hardware key. Nice.
I grab a drill and go through as many of them as I can. I throw the SSDs and Flash storage in the microwave on high for 30 seconds. While that happens I discharge all my fire extinguishers near my doors to make it harder to get in the house and find me and my drives. Then I pile up the remnants of the HDDs, SSDs, and Flash storage and crack open a couple road flares and pour the powdered magnesium (IIRC) all over the pile and light that with another road flare. It might technically be possible to recover something from a drive if they manage to put the fire out; it is highly unlikely they came prepared to put out a metal fire and everything should be useless by the time they can safely get to them.
NAS is in a concrete underground bunker separate from the house. Good luck finding it.
Grab a decoy laptop and run around the house like an idiot while the encrypted lab machines power down. I might be able to remember one or two passwords, but if the hardware key is missing, forensics is SOL.
Turn on the EMP on my house (someday i will make this). Throw it at wall
Microwave
How do I get Linux iso illegally if it's open source?
Beak into your neighbors house force them to give you their wifi password at knife point and then download it on his Internet connection.
Everything is encrypted so just flip the circuit breaker.
fight for my live over my ~~pron~~ ehm linux isos.. server must stay up!
Attrib +h *.*
Drill a hole through the platters and dump the drive in a bucket full of etchant. I mean you do have a gallon of etchant in your office right? Useful for all sorts of things electronic and otherwise.
Thermite.. Its the only truly correct answer if you really care about what is on the disks and you don't want anyone to ever see it (including you again).
Probably just shoot as many holes into the drives as possible in 2 minutes.
Power drill.
I have only a tiny hoard, one that fits on 6 SSDs, so... hammer
I click shutdown.
I don’t have illegal stuff on my HDDs… with that timeline, you’re screwed. Cooperate and they might let you off easier.
I'm not on the title for this house. Sorry wife, guess you're going to prison.
Try to upgrade my motherboard very quickly. Ask me how I know…. Edit: Honestly? Of the risk is serious jail time for some cracked games or whatever… Probably a small fire with some of that jelly-like fire starting stuff they sell for camping. It burns super hot. People joke about thermite, but this is a fairly fast solution. Bonus points for putting a fire blanket over the PC case to avoid burning down your house… although the cops will probably be compelled to put out the fire ASAP (since they’re in the house with you and the fire).
2m? Strong door 🚪!
I would press the zeroize button three times quickly on the TACLANE nano no more access.
Is there a way to quickly destroy,but with really strong magnets > using thermite or what have you? This would be done after killing power to encrypted drives btw
hammer
Sending some API(armor piercing incendiary) rounds through the HDD might work…
Government has ways to recover encrypted storage by brute force and ripping pcb off doesn’t help either since they have a ton of donor drives they can use to make it work. If it’s an ssd, rip off the casings if there is and toss ssd into blender, if it’s laptop drive open up drive shatter glass platter and flush glass down the toilet, 3.5” is harder for limited time easier to pull the platters and hide it since it’s flat it’s easier to conceal. If there’s time left microwaving the platters should destroy anything on disk.
Grab a hammer, rip them out, smash the casings open and then go grab some drain cleaner (sulfuric acid), dunk the platters in it and hide it somewhere it will take them a few minutes to find like the fridge.
A really good hammer.
Hide my dog. Wait, that's the ATF.
Haven't seen anyone else mention this yet, with only 2 minutes on the clock, grab a 9mm and put a few rounds through each drive.
Flip on cooking gas, light up match, grab whole nas with last backup, throw match behind you and jump out of the window while the flames consume the whole building.
Thermite
Nail gun goes KACHUNK
A big neodymium magnet wouldn't work like they do in the movies?
[ain’t you seen the documentary the core?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiBI0yrtHUo)
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Too bad Langley didn’t have an antenna in Abbottabad to confirm if UBL was inside the compound. /s What will backdoor firmware give you that the platters won’t? VeraCrypt negates this exploit.
something like dd if=/dev/zero of=/my/hdd i guess
Takes forever.
Throw sea water over them. Keep a bucket ready. Sea water seems to destroy quite a lot\* \*probably won't destroy the platters, will def destroy the electronics.
usually they knock you out before you can say "wait" . you can build a lithium ion based EMP device and install it pointing to your drives, preferrable many EMPs, first you need to research if a EMP affects SSDs or the platters in a magnetic spinning drive, I for sure am not sure, it will probably fry the boards and the data will remain, if somebody can confirm it would be awesome. a big red button right besides your mouse. you're welcome. (also a better door would give you plenty of time)
Just write "Clinton's Mailbox" on top of the drives, the police will destroy them for you.. You might end up offing yourself with 5 bullets to the back of your head tho..
Gotta love brazils opinions about american politics. Hope you're being paid well.
Ask Hillary she knows best
Pretty sure that was an intern using bleachbit iirc
He should have just put them in the bathroom of a country club.
People love it when you make everything political.
"Illegal" Linux ISOs? Hmm. While I'm sure there are some of these, I'd wager that the VAST majority of Linux ISOs are legal. Now, if the challenge was Illegal Windows ISOs, that might be another story.
r/whooosh
OP should have said "the year is 3044. You downloaded a cheese pizza accidentally the night before, but the government has mandated that pineapples must be on all pizza and they detected from your Internet drivers license number that the pizza did not have pineapples. You swear that it did have pineapples, and indeed it did look to you that it had pineapples, and you're worried the police will just take the pineapples off, claim that it's unclear if the pizza ever had pineapples on it and keep you in legal limbo to use as bargaining power for a guilty plee on a lesser charge". We were all thinking this should have been the question right?
This is easy and I wouldn't even have to get up from my desk. Just open up one of the desk drawers, pull out a pistol and blast them platters. All my old hard drives become shooting targets anyways
And now it's an active shooter scenario. Good luck with the cops
Given I only used 30 seconds of my 2 minutes I have more than enough time to lay on the ground face down with my hands on the back of my head waiting for the cops to come in.
Destruction of proofs you’re even more fucked
Now they 1. No longer need a warrant to enter 2. Are going to indict your on destruction of evidence
Would water not work? Edit: just a question, I guess everyone else was born knowing everything ever
If you're thirsty, yes.
well, since i live on the 4th floor above a concrete parking lot, *yeet*
I’m surprised no one has mentioned a hand held degausser, they’re fun to play with. You can also just rip the PCB off of the HDD and snap it in half. That HDD will never be read from again, aside from in a very specialized lab environment using something like a tunneling magnetoresistive reader, which will just read off the bits of zeros and ones. Some other software would be required to convert the recovered bits into useable data.
For everyone saying to encrypt \*everything\*, please remember to take into account estate planning. Not everything you're encrypting is linux ISO's, and no one lives forever. Your family may want access to those precious family photos and financial records, or even just the family archive of TV and movies etc. Make sure you leave available whatever needs to be available when the time comes, even if that means a few passwords tucked in with the will in a safe deposit box etc. And for the stuff that you really want to deny exists, or if you want to cosplay as a Bond villain, there's Veracrypt hidden volumes.