The Hidden Risks of Digital Storage : Learning from a Hard Drive Replacement

in #hive-1538502 months ago

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In crypto world the keys or password of you account is everything and always keep in mind no key no crypto. In other terms of you do not have the keys or the password of your account, you do not have the ownership of the account. So its always most important to keep your keys or password of you account remembered. But it's not easy as auto generated password are difficult to remember and the length strings with combination of letters and numbers make it impossible to keep everything in mind. So what else is the option?


The another option is to take a print out or write down your keys on paper and keep it in safe place. Remember the key decides the ownership and in case of the Hive blockchain this is not way to recover the keys if you forget to store it. And in case your account has been compromised and the the cheater changes the master password than their is no way to recover the keys. The first activity for a newbie on Hive should be securely save your all keys. Most of the time we save those keys or password in our computer itself. That make us more comfortable and hand in case we want to use them anywhere. Its ok until any other does not have any access to our hard drive or system. Its easy to make sure that any stranger should not access you system by using the logging password in our operation system settings. But what you will do it some one get hands on you hard disk itself.


This thought come into my mind recently when I replaced my laptop's hard disk with new solid state hard disk. Few months back I purchased a new solid state hard disk for my laptop. The reason was the slow speed of my system. On IT guy in our company suggest me to replace the HDD of my computer with SSD when I asked him the reason for slow processing speed of my laptop. He was very confident that with the replacement of hard disk their will be significant improvement in processing speed of my system. I asked him to purchase one and install in my laptop. I decided to keep older disk also so that I can use it as a backup hard disk. After the installation of new SSD the system was really fast. It took only few seconds to load windows after pressing the power on button. I was very happy and say thanks to the guy.


Everything was absolutely fine for few months and some day suddenly the screen of system when blue and it was showing some error message. Fortunately I made a complete back of my OS so it was not bug issue to restore the OS. In few minutes I got my system back to the position it was before the blue screen error. To my surprise the same thing happened again and again. This make me completely very disappointed. The guy who installed the SDD in my laptop was also left the job and when I contacted him over the phone he suggested me to visit the service center to get it replaced. Now it become another task for me as I have to take leave or may have to wait for the weekly Saturday off to visit the service center. Any how I will manage that. The problem's real story starts form here.


As I mentioned we must store the keys or password of all our crypto wallets in safe place as the access to those information may leads to the high financial losses. I usually save my passwords in my hard disk. It was sure that I have to submit my SSD to the service center and they may be repaired it or may give me a replacement. In any case they will get the possession of my hard disk and also access to my data. Anyone will suggest here to format the hard drive and in this way we will erase the data form the hard disk. But it's not completely true. When we format the hard drive it erase the data but still the data is recoverable by using some data recovery software. This is not at all a big deal these days for any tech guy. So what is the way to get rid of it.

The answer is - wiping the data form the hard drive using some special software which ensures that all data should completely get erased and should be non recoverable state. I will not go much into technicalities of it as this is not the part of my this publication.


Assume a scenario where someone with thousands dollars of crypto in their wallet stored the password in this hard disk and give the same to some unknown person. Its not just for repair but also applicable when we sold the old hard drive to some one else. And the guy get access to the hard disk recovered the password and take possession of cryto account. That will take some seconds for him to transfer the crypto to some other account.
I like to mention that changing the password in such cases is also effective but it's always better to erase all data form hard drive.


What are your view let me know in comment section.


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