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Encryption is Cheaper than Destruction

Rich September 1, 2006 1 Comment

I like to think Richard Stiennon and I are good friends. He was at my wedding in Mexico. I took him and his son skiing up at Copper Mountain where I used to patrol. For a time he even rented space in my condo in Boulder while I was slowly moving to Phoenix. We’d swap my car out at the airport parking lot; it was very convenient. But I never suspected he was so violent. Goes to show you that you can never really know someone. It all started with this post on his blog where he advocates smashing old hard drives rather than taking the risk of the data being later recovered. I thought, “okay, he’s just trying to make a point”. But yesterday, over at Emergent Chaos, he expanded his violent tendencies towards cell phones in this post. Now I’m worried. I mean this is a man I’ve left in my home, who spent evenings in Mexico drinking with my family members. I’ve even loaned him my cellphone for the occasional call! I feel lucky it came back in one piece. Maybe because I had it in silent mode or something. But here’s some food for thought. I was talking to a client a while back about old hard drives. They were considering encryption since their SAN (Storage Area Network) was managed by their reseller who frequently swapped out failed drives. They looked at degaussing or smashing the drives- just as RIchard suggested. The cost? $8,000,000.00 a year. $8M a year. Wow. That’s a fair amount of cash, even with the weakened dollar. And those cell phones? The pollutants in them are pretty potent and many recycled phones end up in needy hands. So Richard might want to consider other options. We estimated that client would only need to pay $100,000-$200,000 to encrypt that SAN. Keys are stored externally so the data is unrecoverable. And portable devices? If there’s something sensitive on them you should really be encrypting them anyway. People lose those things you know. Richard- I know a good anger management therapist. Call me, your friends are worried. Share:

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