Ryanair Account Hacked €4.6Million

[Bryanpoprobson]

Apparently Ryanair has had €4.6M taken from it's accounts via a bank in China. However the way I heard it is that the amount was only €5, the rest was fees and charges. I'm sorry I couldn't resist, I'll get my coat.

[LionKing]

Apparently Ryanair has had €4.6M taken from it's accounts via a bank in China. However the way I heard it is that the amount was only €5, the rest was fees and charges. I'm sorry I couldn't resist, I'll get my coat.

was reading about ewaste in Ghana and other countries like China and how accessing hard drives by criminals allows them to have access to sensitive information.

[Bryanpoprobson]

I always keep or totally destroy my hard drives.

[Allan F]

I disassemble mine, and extract the neodynium magnet inside. They are great fun and works wonders on a whiteboard.

[Echnaton]

I use a sledge hammer to protect data on discarded drive.  A friend has a drive chipper that he uses when commercially recycling commuters.

One source of leakage has been in hard drives that are use in coppiers.  For years people that really should have been taking more care simply sold off old copiers while other would buy for referb and export and scan the hard drives in the process.

I didn't know Ryanair had such a bad reputation.  Spirit airlines is notorious for exorbitant fees charges to the unaware and caginess in informing passengers of them in advance.

Welcome to the Internet age.

[Luke Pemberton]

A friend has a drive chipper that he uses when commercially recycling commuters.

Bloody hell, that sounds like a scene from Fargo.

[Luther]

I use a sledge hammer to protect data on discarded drive.

I have used just an ordinary carpentry hammer, which reduces some drives to something close to dust.  But others seem to be made of much sterner stuff.  I just continue to store them.

Different technologies, I suppose.

A friend has a drive chipper that he uses when commercially recycling commuters.

What Luke Pemberton said!

[Echnaton]

A friend has a drive chipper that he uses when commercially recycling commuters.

Bloody hell, that sounds like a scene from Fargo.

Were there a a lot of typos in that movie?   

[ka9q]

There's a much easier and far less violent way to destroy data on an old hard drive. And it can even be safely reused.

For many years, all standard ATA hard drives have supported a "secure erase" command in firmware. It writes zeroes across every block on the disk. It cannot be interrupted by removing power; when you power it up again, the erase operation continues. This means that if you're in a hurry, you need not actually wait for the erase operation to finish. (It can take hours for a large rotating drive.)

A compromise approach that doesn't tie up your computer is to start the erase, then pull the drive and plug it into a power supply by itself to let the erase finish.

On Linux, you issue the two-command sequence

hdparm --security-set-pass foobar /dev/sdx
hdparm --security-erase foobar /dev/sdx

where /dev/sdx is the device name (be absolutely SURE you get the right one!) The erase command requires that a security password first be set on the drive; that's the reason for the first command. Also, the drive cannot be "frozen"; this is a command that, once issued, disables these commands until power is cycled. Some BIOSes issue the freeze command at boot to protect the drive against malware and accidents, so you'll have to turn it off.

I just happened to do this a half hour ago with a spare SSD that I was recycling into another machine. Secure erase on a SSD is very fast, taking only a few minutes.

[Luke Pemberton]

Were there a a lot of typos in that movie?   

No, but I always remember watching the wood chipper scene with an Australian minister, and he laughed. He did have a dark sense of humour.

[ka9q]

No, but I always remember watching the wood chipper scene with an Australian minister, and he laughed. He did have a dark sense of humour.

Any viewer without a dark sense of humor is probably long gone before that scene. It took me a while to count all the dead bodies in that movie. Maybe not as many as at the end of Hamlet, but it was a big pile.

Favorite line: "And I guess that was your accomplice in the woodchipper, eh?"

Woodchippers were a common sight around my neighborhood as a kid. The power company sent them with crews for free whenever you wanted to get rid of a tree. But I never saw one in quite the same way after Fargo.

My second favorite scene in the movie is near the beginning. Margie visits the site of the first three murders and correctly deduces the whole sequence of events while her idiot deputy can only stand there holding the coffee. Then she throws up from morning sickness, not from all the gore.

[gillianren]

Okay, completely off topic of Ryanair, but on the Fargo discussion.

Does anyone here believe Margie was considering an affair with Mike Yanagita?  Because I heard that suggested during discussion of the movie on a site I frequent when Fargo was Movie of the Week, and I'm not buying it.

[Echnaton]

Does anyone here believe Margie was considering an affair with Mike Yanagita?

I stay completely out of such discussions.  After watching the Avengers movie this weekend with my wife and daughter, my silence was notable in the post viewing film dissection of who got together, should have gotten together, were the pairings believable and why.

Margie visits the site of the first three murders and correctly deduces the whole sequence of events while her idiot deputy can only stand there holding the coffee. Then she throws up from morning sickness, not from all the gore.

This is one of the best things about Fargo for me.  It was a reversal of the typical cop show cliche where the hardened and desensitized man has to go home and stoically be the warm family man.

[Luther]

There's a much easier and far less violent way to destroy data on an old hard drive. And it can even be safely reused.

I have used a different procedure (specifically, the Unix "dd" command) to copy random data to the entire hard drive.  However, I don't do this very often, since I am usually getting rid of a drive after it has failed.  If it's still working, but I'm getting rid of the computer, I'll usually just pop it into the new computer as a spare drive, unless the bus technology on the new computer is incompatible with the drive.

[ka9q]

Oh sure, I've also done dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk bs=1M quite a few times.

Or dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/disk bs=1M if you feel like it.

But the security erase has the advantage of doing it in the drive firmware so the computer doesn't need to be involved. In fact, you don't even need a computer to finish the process once you've started it. All you need is a power supply.

Also, overwriting doesn't do what you think it does when the target is an SSD.