Don’t erase it, shoot it!
Tuesday 26th August, 2008The item on this evening's PM programme on BBC radio 4 about the server bought on eBay that had financial data on it, reminded me of an incident in my earlier life.
The programme item covered the secure destruction of data; including the suggestion from Bill Thompson that one could shoot the drive.
My first contract job after leaving ICL was with a defence contractor that did a lot of work with military intelligence (sic). This company had a number of computer systems installed in locations close to the inner German border (i.e. between East and West Germany) and the destruction of the computers was in issue. Two solutions were devised:
The programme item covered the secure destruction of data; including the suggestion from Bill Thompson that one could shoot the drive.
My first contract job after leaving ICL was with a defence contractor that did a lot of work with military intelligence (sic). This company had a number of computer systems installed in locations close to the inner German border (i.e. between East and West Germany) and the destruction of the computers was in issue. Two solutions were devised:
- For emergency destruction (e.g. in the event that The Red Army decided to go on manoeuvrers in West Germany) the computers were equipped with explosive devices that could be detonated remotely.
- For routine drive destruction ( the drives held a whole 5 MB of data! and were the size of a washing machine) the drives were used for target practice by BAOR's tanks and artillery!
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