Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN)
One of the more common problems that I see among clients, especially smaller ones, is appropriate destruction of data before retiring/selling/destroying computer systems. If you’ve got a relatively modern system (i.e., SCSI, ATA or SATA drives), you can use Darik’s Boot And Nuke (DBAN). If you have an older system (mainframe, etc…), DBAN won’t really be able to help you out – I suggest a chainsaw and a hammer (or pay someone else to do it).
If you can use DBAN though, it’s easy to use and comes with several types of wipes depending on your situation. DBAN supports a Quick Erase, RCMP TSSIT OPS-II, DoD Short (3 passes), DoD 5220.22-M (7 passes), Gutmann Wipe, and PRNG Stream as the types of wipes. Each type of wipe is useful in different situations, with the Gutmann Wipe currently thought of as for paranoid people only, and the DoD wipes as “good-enough” (for government work…). Any of the wipe methods except the quick erase will get rid of your data so that no one else has a good chance of recovering it.
Wipe Options
Using DBAN is very easy – you download a boot image (either ISO, floppy, or USB) and boot from the device. DBAN gets started, and you can either run it from the command line (if you’re familiar with the options), or you can run it in interactive mode and make the selections from a “GUI.”
Once you’ve selected your options, press F10 to get started, and then go find something else to do. If you’re using Gutmann’s wipe or the DoD (non short) wipe, it’s going to take a while. I usually set it running at night before I go to bed, and it’s usually done in the morning. Of course, the larger the drive, the longer it will take.
For those of you who need to pay for the service (audit trails, etc), Darik also offers EBAN, which comes with some nice features for wiping a lot of disks at once and recording the serial numbers of each drive it wipes.
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July 13th, 2009 at 9:01 am
[...] #1 – Destroy That Data: In their post “Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN),” @geminisecurity tackles a topic that you don’t hear about often enough: Destroying data before retiring, selling, or destroying computer systems. While @geminisecurity says that you can use DBAN for newer systems, what do you do with the older systems? Other than using “a chainsaw and a hammer” to get rid of the data, @geminisecurity suggests the words that make all of the do-it-yourselfer’s cringe: “pay someone else to do it.” While it’s tempting to think that you can handle the complete destruction or removal of data from an older system, sometimes it ‘pays’ to pay a specialist to do it. But for those of you who have the newer systems and would like to know more about DBAN, check out the full post by @geminisecurity here. [...]