Posted on 07/26/2009 1:46:23 PM PDT by poiuqwer
At my workplace they must be encrypted, which is a major hassle.
As to the espionage theories...with electronics almost anything is possible.
For $100.00—take a hammer to it....I completely agree with you. I bought a used pc a few years ago, got it home booted it, and it booted...To my surprise, it was a pc from a VERY big computer company with what appeared to be confidential info. I called the local branch and they switched me around for a few minutes until I got a tech guy that almost laughed when I told what I had. He stopped laughing when I read a few emails from one of the exec’s. They requested that I bring the pc to them for cleaning and I did. They were to call me to pick it up the next day. Never heard from them and they tech guy would not respond to my calls. Basically, for my good deeds, I lost $50.00....Next time, I will build a website and post the data for everyone to see,,,,
Thieves don't care about what most people do! They care about what some people do. Most people lock their doors. Some accidentally leave them open one day. That's what thieves look for.
Many people backup everything, including email files, financial documents, personal information, which can often be used to deduce passwords and bank accounts. Their only concern is to protect their data from the main internal drive failures; not from spies.
i think its absurd for being so paranoid. Who are you? That the Chinese want to know your secret. Waste of time assigning millions of man hours sniff through nobodies just so they could magically stumble on some top secret information they could use. Theres better ways of putting that resources to good use
Recently I had to send my hdd to singapore to get it fixed under warranty. Maybe they too want to know my SECRETS
Every HDD where I work is either secure cleansed or crushed. An untouched drive doesn’t leave.
Yuck. You actually thought buying a USB drive at Costco was a good idea for a secure back up?
Either way I would simply take it out of its enclosure and hook it directly up to the mainboard and see if the drive itself is dead. If it is get a heavy magnet and sit it on the drive for a couple of days at least. Wven then I still wouldnt be secure with the thought of sending it in.
If the drive is good buy a new enclosure from Newegg. However I doubt it is. Cheap external drives have poor air cirulation which kills the drive.
Your USB external drives are configured as a RAID array?
I use NAS rather than USB for that, but I suppose USB is cheaper.
In any event, make the Chinese replace it. Serves them right for making junk.
But I’d take a big magnet to it first, anyway.
Seagate has the drive, updated the firmware, and will ship it back to me Monday. They made an image of this drive in case it's lost during shipping, or DOA.
I have been told by Seagate this image will be erased in 14 days. To me Seagate tech support has been fantastic with this added level of data protection.
Bottom line - if you ever need data recovery off a DOA hard drive, understand others will, and can see what was stored.
That sounds like a lot of trouble for China to go through when they can simply put a virus on your Windows computer and steal your data immediately.
i think its more likely some lone worker will snoop into it out of curioristy, than some government sanctioned order to do it. But that goes on everywhere. e.g Take your computer to store where you bought it at to get fixed, and there’ll be that a worker there will look at what porn you downloaded recently
bump with no comment
It would make sure that no information was ever passed onto a drive that was not encrypted, you could also set up your business computers to not let a device be hooked up to a USB source unless it was on an approved list that included the encryption key.
I might make the key programmable so that the manufacture could not access the drives either, course if the key's become corrupted you'd be scr3wed.
If you ID each key and had a pass phrase you could know who and when transferred any info to or from your system.
You could set the key up with an internal hardware recognition so that it would only allow access from an approved source, that way if somebody lost the key it would be useless without access to the hardware and the drive.
You might make it so that the key must be updated every 24 to 72 hrs from the home system just to check that it has not fallen into the wrong hands.
For the past three weeks, every time I come home from work I discover some Chinese looking kid messing with my computer. I mean, I throw them out and everything but, enough is enough. I put one of those “No Chinese Kids Allowed” signs in my window. So far, so good, but that was only this morning, so who knows.
Would a good does of high energy magnetism or microwave energy make the drive useless to our Chinese friends?
And for the next fourteen days those seagate techs will be watching the porno’s on that drive.... ha ha. Then onto another drive.
If it were me and I knew there was sensitive info on that drive, I would smash it up and burn the pieces. (hi, algor!)
Eating the cost of the drive world be worth the peace of mind.
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