Talks to Watch

DEF CON 23 - Zoz - And That's How I Lost My Other Eye...Explorations in Data Destruction (Fixed)

533K views · Aug 21, 2015 · 53:09 · 2 HN recommenders · 5 mentions · discussed 2016–2022

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 points people here: HN points to it whenever hard drive destruction or fast physical data wiping comes up, as an empirical test of what actually works.

“Take a look at this talk from DEF CON 23 on what it takes to safely destroy HDDs”HN comment, 2016

What Hacker News said 5

Strongly recommendsdwyermJan 2020

“Highly recommended by me, too”

Zoz's talk on data destruction explorations.

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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
Recommendsopen_bearAug 2016

“Take a look at this talk from DEF CON 23 on what it takes to safely destroy HDDs”

What it takes to safely destroy hard drives, even with explosions.

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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
Cites itjfindleyJan 2016

“Thermite, even the more explosive copper-based variant, is pretty poor at destroying disk platters, sadly.”

Experiments destroying hard drives with thermite and explosives.

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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
Cites itmagnatDec 2017

“There was a DEF CON 23 talk [1] exploring ways to quickly wipe your servers in situ using physical methods.”

Physical methods for quickly wiping servers in situ.

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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
Cites itpvillanoMay 2022

“there was a defcon talk where they tested multiple methods for rapid hard drive erasure”

Tests of multiple rapid hard drive erasure methods.

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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