Some people have access to corporate cast-offs, so there are some people sat on massive supplies of used gear.. It all disappears somewhere eventually 🤭

[–] skankhunt42@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Ah, good point. I had a few 1u servers from work but never got many disks. They always had to be destroyed with an actual certificate of destruction... Everything else was taken to recycling in my personal vehicle.

[–] greyscale@lemmy.grey.ooo 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I can tell you right now that not everything that goes to recycler and gets a cert even gets wiped.

Someone, somewhere said it was, therefore, the box is ticked.

And this will remain so until there isn't an economic imperative.

[–] ToxicWaste@lemmy.cafe 5 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

i used to work for a company with sensitive data. disks that did get a certificate, where wiped by our guys first. then a truck from the recycling/destruction company would arrive and disks get shredded 1 at a time. the whole setup was in a way, that you could observe the disks being torn into pieces, somewhat bigger than sawdust.

two of our IT guys, two of the guys doing the destroying and some C-Suit would have to sign for every disk they observed being torn to pieces. if you do want to make sure your data is gone, there are ways to do it. admittedly, this way is a bit of a stunt. but it was fun being paid for observing bits of metal being reduced to pieces.

[–] greyscale@lemmy.grey.ooo 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

So, I present my paradox: If the data was sensitive, it wouldn't be disposed of properly. If the data is irrelevant or encrypted at rest, the disks are disposed of unneccisarilly.

I bet what you were handling wasn't -that- comparatively sensitive, so its a whole bunch of human effort and material being pulverised for no reason.

Because I can ensure you that the people who should -always- be that thorough are not. Especially right now. There's all sorts of drives that shouldn't be out in the wild, out in the wild.

I'm a little surprised there isn't buyers for liberated disks (and their data) from ASEAN datacenters.

Additionally, if an attacker wanted to steal your business data, they'd be your contracted, approved disposal partner already.

[–] ToxicWaste@lemmy.cafe 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

what would be your way of disposing that sensitive data?

not arguing that there are disks beind disposed inproperly.

[–] greyscale@lemmy.grey.ooo 2 points 47 minutes ago

if its encrypted at rest, it doesn't need it.