Sanitising cPanel servers after de-commissioning?

[samsam]

Hi all:

Just a quick question for Andrew:

when a cPanel server is de-commissioned (eg like cpanel31 recently was) is there a procedure Dathorn goes through to sanitise/ securely delete all the content on them before they go back to The Planet or whoever the hardware is leased from?

It just concerns me that if this isn't done, and done properly, there is some possibility that after any cPanel upgrade there may be servers or hard-drives floating around somewhere with potentially sensitive data (login names, logs, emails etc) that are either just sitting there on the file-system, or not thoroughly deleted, and thus easily recovered by anyone who may the next user of the hardware.

Tools like Wipe - http://wipe.sourceforge.net - or srm - http://srm.sourceforge.net - or others would do a decent job on sanitising the hard-drives, although perhaps not as well as a hammer and a power-drill would.

[AndrewT]

Believe it or not a lot of the drives aren't even worthy of being used again on the servers that have been upgraded. But to answer your question, yes, everything is cleaned from the drives completely once we take the servers offline.

[samsam]

Cool. Hopefully the clean is v.thorough too.

In one place I worked, after secure deletion, old PC's had their hard-drives physically trashed (read drill multiple holes through the whole drive, mangling the platters).

In another, they had a huge (8ft+ tall) magnetic pulse machine, where the guy loaded up the old hard drives next to the device, then left the room and triggered the EM blast, hopefully completely re/demagnetising the hard disk platters and any other magnetic media you wanted erased.

Apparently this was not a good place to be working if you had any body piercings, earrings or even tooth fillings.