dietss wrote:
"chief scientist of security firm DKH, says 100 percent physical data destruction is nearly impossible. The only method that comes close is overwriting the disk. (Kaminsky is not involved with the Newtown case.)"
I am confident I could achieve a 100 percent data destruction.
Somebody must have thought they were hiding something by smashing those computer hard-drives the FBI recovered from the home of Imran Awan, Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s former information technology (IT) aide.
But odds are excellent they were wrong. Federal law enforcement authorities may have already recovered and read whatever was on those hard drives.
“It depends on what happens, but even if it is hit with a hammer, it probably doesn’t damage the platters that actually hold the data, which remains recoverable,†said Tom Hakim, engineering supervisor for werecoverdata.com, a New York-based lab that specializes in difficult digital retrieval.
“In most cases, it’s very likely†the information on a smashed hard drive can be recovered “in two or three days, maybe a week,†Hakim said.
His lab, which does extensive work for law enforcement and Fortune 500 corporations, has also recovered data from disks that were in fires and that had been submerged in water.