 So I thought, so this guy shmoo, the actual guy shmoo, I'll keep this very short, he likes to pick on me because I'm kind of gullible. Once upon a time he told me that chickens were hermaphrodites and because I was asking, hey, why are there so few roosters and so many female hens on a farm? And I didn't realize until I saw the American Dad episode, they grind up all the roosters and the chicken feed that that's what actually happens. I learned agriculture from American Dad. And since American Dad wasn't around in the late 90s when he told me the story, he said it's like Jurassic Park where when they hatched, they just, you know, one of them kind of elects themselves as male and the rest are all female. And I thought, that's the most fucking amazing thing ever. So I start telling people this. I go to work and I tell everyone in the office, you know, chickens are hermaphrodites and they elect a male, it's awesome. And then you kill them and another one comes around and they're like, I think you're wrong. And I'm like, bullshit. And so after like a week, shmoo finally says, you know, dude, I totally made that up. Anyway, so this is the story about how we lost an eye. And just to be clear, that's me with a microscope. The sun's in the air and I'm looking at a hard drive platter which happens to be very shiny. It's really fucking bright. So anyway, that joke fell flat. So we're going to keep on trekkin'. Who are we? Deviant. You want to say a few words about yourself? I'm a value-sized bucket full of free fun and you should find me outside this talk. Can you supersize me later? I'm Bruce Potter, founder of the shmoo group and I do other stuff. I do run a small consulting company in central Maryland and just to pin myself out, we're hiring developers so feel free to email me later. And Shane? Hi, I'm Shane Lawson. I work for, hi, thanks. I work for Tennessee Solutions. My entire executive staff is sitting right here staring at me. I think we're hiring. Yes, we're hiring. That's a whole talk. We're done. Thanks, boy. All right, so you should go sign up for Act Fortress, like I'm not fucking around. If you want out of here afterwards, there will be sign up sheets and you have to sign up before you leave the room. It's tomorrow only. Today is just free play. Tomorrow it starts at 10 a.m. So you can sign up for a later time slot if you think 10 a.m. is too fucking early. Feel free to sign up for the noon one. What are we doing here? So a long, long time ago I worked for this company called Fort Knox, N-O-C-S, not K-N-O-X. That's how you had to answer the phone because no one understood what the hell you were saying in Anchorage, Alaska. And we were going to do credit card processing. We're going to do set processing and potentially even do digital bear settlement stuff. And we were building these big ass transaction processing servers and scattering them around the country. It turns out Anchorage isn't near anything except the water. And so we were a little worried that if we had these servers that had all this information, this is pre-PCI, so we were just going to store everything in the clearing. There's a lot of subtlety to that statement. Anyway, and we were worried that bad guys were going to come and try to bag our boxes. And we thought, hey, you know, what we'd really like to do is have a way to remotely destroy a drive. Just make the drive, go away. And we wanted complete goddamn drive destruction. Like a pile of slag. Like our first thought was thermite. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of people's first thought because it's fun. But there's some critical issues with thermite. It's self-oxidizing, so it likes to go through things. Whatever's below it, gravity keeps going. So we really wanted though a solution that would make the entire drive go away because we were worried that even if there were a few bits of information left on the drive, if they were the right bits, they could be worth a lot of money. So for those that don't know about something like digital bear certificates, this is an idea, same idea as bitcoins, just not really a psychotic. Someone explained bitcoins to me the other night in a bar and I thought it was a joke. Like I understand the concept that these bits are worth money, but like the actual process and all the weird static values are associated, like every six weeks this happens. And every two years this happens. I'm like, oh, we just pulled values out of the air. I see them. We called it a currency. Excellent. So, wow. You were all thinking that this is crazy shit, but everyone's wearing a t-shirt, so it must be all right. Anyway, we wanted to make sure that if there were $10 million in bear certificates or bitcoins, someone that wasn't willing to spend $10 million to see if they could recover the right string of bits. So we wanted the drive to go away. Unfortunately, we were a little too busy trying to also get venture capital and burn through it all in the form of not doing anything. And yes, because that was the way the end of the 90s really worked out. I was like, hey, we got money. Go back to playing quick three. And it didn't work out. So one day we're sitting around my house after Schmucon in the snowstorm because it always fucking snowed during Schmucon. And Deviant was there and Shane was there and a few other people were there. And I was telling them about this little thing that we tried to do. And we decided, hey, you know, maybe we should take this idea and do something with it for DEF CON. So the rules of the game that we were trying to do up in Anchorage and we continue to carry forward today, which is why you're all here, is destroying a drive in the following fashion. One, you have a 1U server. You have 1U above and below to install whatever the hell you want in the rack. So concrete, asbestos, you know, things like that. When you fire the hard drive, you have 60 seconds to destroy it, you must not set off fire suppression, smoke sensors, seismic sensors because we're near banks. Must not harm other system in the rack and you must not harm the humans that happen to be nearby when you're lighting off your thermbite or magnesium or something like that. So we undertook this talk in an attempt to see if we could realize my private little dream of destroying a goddamn hard drive. And so we will get to the various methods that we use, but needless to say, we accepted the challenge. Fortune fucked the world. So someone in the audience is thinking, hey, why don't you just use the fucking crypto, you jerk? And you're right. We could have done that. Like that's a totally valid response. So first of all, we wanted this to be a spectacle and crypto is not really a spectacle. You ever watch a demo of a crypto system? It's really exciting. It's encrypting right now. It's done. That's it. So yeah, it's always going to have the redneck roar once in a while in the middle of the talk to wake up all the people. Was that pretty goddamn loud? What? Triple des. That's not really redneck. Des is kind of redneck, you know. One time pad written on the side of your pinto is redneck. So there's some reasonable crypto solutions out there. There's some various open source stuff. There's opal and other self encrypting drives that you can use. The issue really comes down to zeroization. If you're going to zeroize out the data or zeroize out the key, I mean the idea is you have this encrypted data with some very large key and when you want the data to go away, you just throw the key in the trash. And you just have to make sure that you throw the key in the trash and in an effective enough fashion that it can't be recovered. What's kind of a bummer about that is if you don't do it, then all they need to do is recover 256 bits or 2000 bits of data and then they can decrypt the entire drive versus if we're successful, there's absolutely nothing left except powder. So you know, and it stands to reason that if you're going to use an encrypted drive, you could just go after the bits like the little, you know, TPM or whatever we could incinerate that, which would prove to be remarkably easy compared to what the hell we tried to do. So there's various drive destruction standards. Anyway, there are drive destroyers. This one that DT, I thought was bringing down to the con but I haven't seen it yet, is the low end version of a drive destroyer. First you have to degauss the drive which has varying amounts of effects on modern day drives. And then there's this little anvil thing in the middle and one little point that as Shane calls it makes a little hard drive taco because it puts 12,000 pounds of force in the middle of the drive and the drive kind of folds up and shatters, which for most of the standards that are out there qualify as drive destruction. But if you ask someone what this was and you hold up a broken drive that's been shattered by one of these are going to say a hard drive. It turns out you can get things that you can hold up pieces and go what was this and people are going to say a pinto. And this is an $80,000 drive disintegrator. That's what they call on the website. A drive disintegrator. It was like check. That's add to cart. $80,000. I paid in bitcoins. It's coming. I've been mining for weeks just to save it up for this drive disintegrator. This thing will eat laptops, small children, farm animals, male chickens as it turns out. Will has shredded. You can put a blend tech into this thing and it will shred the blend tech. Like I assure you. So there are some issues with this. Costs are kind of expensive even in bitcoins. Unless anyone wants to attack Mt. Gox we can drive the value of bitcoins through the roof for five minutes so I can buy my drive disintegrator. Going to keep turning that. There's going to be a hit on me by the entire bitcoin cabal later. It's going to be great. It will be in Brazilia 4 later. Effectiveness, there may still be usable bits especially the ones that make the little hard drive tacos. You're going to get little pieces of hard drive. There may still be data on that. That's some use. And form factor. That's about 40 U and three cabinets. So that was a little larger than our winning, the winning submission that we were looking for. So real quick. Yeah, you should go sign up for Hack Fortress. For anyone that was in my Logan eyes talk on hacking game servers a couple of years ago that every single slide transition had stupid noises in between. You should thank me. I decided not to do that this year. You're like, yes. That was the most annoying thing ever. It was one of those jokes. It's like family guy. It's funny and then it's not. And then after a couple more minutes of Conway Twitty singing it gets funny again. That's basically what we were doing. So anyway, someone's grabbing their knee and agonizing pain like anyway. Not a lot of family guy. They'll swim watchers in the audience tonight. So anyway, industrial, this really is not an important slide. Surely there's a better way. And what I want to get into, we're going to talk about the specifics of what we tried so you can learn from our, I'll call them mistakes. So about the ways that we did this. I don't know if you were planning on doing this slide, but I'm going to do it and then I'm going to hand it over to Dean. Is that right? That's why you put my name on it so I can talk about myself in the third person. Or he can talk about himself in the third person. So just to be clear, some of what we did is in the slight gray area from a legality perspective. Deviant will touch on that gently. Very gently in a super sized way. Dangerous. We tried to exercise as much care as we could. There were certainly times when we thought something really bad was going to happen and we're filming it and nothing occurred. So it was actually shockingly undangerous at times, which is really embarrassing, especially in front of your own children. They were like, go stand way on the end of the driveway. And they do, and we get something out. We're like, okay, we're ready. And we do have to like, have you done it yet? We're like, yeah, we did it. Sorry. Go inside. I need to hide. Pseudo science. We definitely made some gold. I contend, but nobody else seemed to believe me, except I did trade it in on the Mt. Gox currency market and I had my bitcoins from the gold that I alchemized out of the hard drive. So we initially split this up into three areas. Incendiary, which was deviance, area of focus, chemical, which was Shane, and physical, which is mine. We're going to go through the efficacy of each of these. And it turns out that we really had the most success in a fourth surprise area that involves strippers and blow. Anyway. All right. How are we doing? Can you hear me? So yes, as Bruce pointed out, incendiary, it actually, it's, I got pretty fucked because there's only two ways you can do this. One is thermite, which doesn't play nice with anything or doesn't play nice with ceramics, which there's a lot of in circuitry and hard drive platters. So that really much just kind of leaves you with explosive blow, blow the crap out of everything, which fails miserably at all the conditions we set for this situation. But I did my best to do some research so I could be up here and talk to you fine people. Unfortunately, we're not going to tell you a lot about this research because I like my butthole and I don't want to be accused of helping you out of make bombs. So I'm not going to say, you know, a lot of chemical, you're not going to get a lot of real chemical formulas, but that's what you proclaim. Oh God, sulfur things, what? No, don't do that. So it's going to kind of go like this. And if you are a smart person, you can figure out how things are and how things go and how things might be for you. So there's this stuff. It's on the inner tubes. We like it because we have guns. It goes boom if you hit it with this. We like to use it because we like guns and booms. If you put it far, far away and put a lot of it out there, it goes boom even bigger. That's really fun. There are some people who put way too much of it in one situation and they make the news when booms are too loud. You don't want to be those. You don't want to be some guy with a dumb truck in like Montana or whatever that was. But there's also this stuff. You think it's the other stuff. It's not the same stuff. You can find this stuff. Why is it not the same stuff? Because it goes boom with this. It also goes boom with this. That's a much smaller impact. That's smaller initiating charge as the feds who are listening to this talk will know. It also means things like this in the Hollywood industry and films and cinema. That also makes that other thing go boom. This is hard to get. It's illegal for you to get. There's an Instructible Online to make your own. Don't do that. Don't initiate one charge into another into another because that's what we call bad. That's what we call massive things that you weren't planning. If you do that, people will want to have a conversation with you. The conversation will take place someplace you don't want to be. So we were talking about how to do this with a server rack. How do you install this kind of incendiary, boomy-ary thing in a server rack? If you want to be legal, if you don't want to be in places you don't want to be, the only way to legally use things that go boom like that ordered on the internet is to shoot them with a round. So you're basically taking a server rack and affixing a live round to it. I don't really want to work in a server environment where there's a fully charged spring on the fricking hammer like rifle at all times, but it doesn't violate federal law. And it's because you are still initiating this server destruction charge with a round. The moment you do it electronically, that's a problem. So remember, don't initiate stuff with batteries or cell phones, et cetera. That's bad. People will talk to you in a place you don't want to be. We've all moved away from IDE hard drives in the past. We do not want to transition to IDE hard drives. IED hard drives, yes. Oh, see, I fucking flubbed the line. Thanks, whiskey guy. That's my only Photoshop of the fucking talk, my IED hard drives. Ah, well that in the ready.gov thing. So yeah, see this is bad because it doesn't fit our model. If you destroy things like this, the feds are cutting us off. Oh no. What happened? What is this? Hey, thank you. They let us back in. Yeah, this is, it's very bad for your room. It is very bad for your desk. You'll probably lose your snacks. 23B is the only one who makes out in this entire equation. So what have we learned today, kids? We have learned that it's possible to do incendiary things or boomy-ary things to your drives. You do not want the emergency crews to come out. We do not want you going home and, you know, burning shit down. We do not want you sent to a freaking ER. We do not want you making new friends. At least not if you're going to blame us for it. If you really think this is up your fucking alley, there are plenty of resources online if you want to be stupid. So yeah, have fun with that. Do not blame us. It was not our fault. Don't try this at home. Thank you. Yeah, I can't follow that. So moving right along, I don't have any great pictures or anything. The whole point of the mic. How's this? All right. Fuck you. So the point of the chemical destruction I was going to spray a mist that goes in to the platters, eats it away, end up having a big bubbling pile of what used to be a platter and probably some burnt fingertips. So it didn't really work. You should go sign up for hack fortress. You may have seen this before in an earlier slide presentation. So the mechanics of this whole thing, I had submersible pumps and lots of acids and lots of other stuff and power and everything and there was going to be arm switches. It was going to spray this great thing in there and it was going to go over the top of it and we were going to market it and sell it and all be really rich. It didn't happen that way either. So one of the main things there, yeah, Cobalt doesn't react with dick. We tried really hard. We mixed a lot of stuff that we shouldn't have mixed together. It was a bad idea. And yeah, I don't want to be on a list. I don't want to make any of those new friends. I don't know where the hell that picture came from but it creeps me out every time I see it. So my other reservations, I don't want to end up like this. Really, this is how we set it up. That's the table on two saw horses. It's really this tall too so it's very safe. What? Yeah, shut up. Could you use your outside voice please? Yeah, they're turning me off. Man's keeping me down. I just want to point out the safety equipment here. There's some arm and hammer baking soda to neutralize any acid that we got on Shane's eye. And I think that's it. That's all the safety equipment we had. Oh, we had metal containers for the acid that we were trying to use to melt metal with. So this whole process, actually, if you look over there, that little white spot, that's from the acid we spilled on the table. A lot of this was a bad idea. The root beer was okay though. So how do I know it didn't work? Well, because it didn't work. The slide's in the wrong spot by the way. Yeah. Okay, keep going. You put it there. No, you put it there. Dick, this is your slides. You must have moved it with all of your Hack Fortress slides. Anyway, you should go sign up for Hack Fortress. Bruce also has a problem with altitude sickness today. So you might want to be forgiving that bike ride. Could you just keep going? They're waiting for it. He pushed out on it just to let you know. That's what two years of training gets you. So we let this stuff soak with a pretty low grade acid and eventually it made a little tiny hole. It really didn't do much. So some of the chemicals in use, they're corrosive. We really did mix a lot of stuff. Some of it may have not been acid. I'm not really sure. Get a little confused about acids and bases. It's not really that important though. We didn't research this anyway as I was told. So in fairness we did try the aluminum platters are made of to cut to the chased aluminum. And the aluminum will be dissolved by phosphoric acid. And you can buy phosphoric acid in the form of battery acid basically. So we tried to use that. We watched it for a while. It was pretty exciting because we mocked it and it didn't do anything. We thought maybe screaming at it like the little red bobs glue or whatever and make it angry. No, didn't work. That is something different. That was the hydrochloric acid low dose. It didn't do much. It's etching solution basically. That also did next to nothing. Well that's what made the little hole. Oh it did. But the hole was actually where you had scratched it. Yeah, I scratched it to prove that it really was a metal platter because you didn't believe me. Yeah, I didn't. So there's some more acid doing nothing. Nothing. Not a damn thing. You're sitting in the Penn and Teller Theater looking at a slide of nothing happening. Just to be clear this is what Defconn's gone to right now. And you're laughing about it. Okay. Next. Awkward. If you ever feel like you've been had. That was when he came in the room. Keep going. So there's more of it. Not working. Also not in focus, but that's cool too. That's because I took that picture. I'm sure someone in this crowd is going to say, oh you guys did it totally wrong. We know this other thing that would have worked great. Fine. Fuck you. Afterwards, and after we get around to what you can do for us later and what we'll do for you if you do something for us later, you can contact us. Shut the fuck up. You're so belligerent. I know. Wait till he gets drunk. He gets all cuddly. Speaking of that, it's your turn. Oh, is this? Oh, okay. Yeah, these are your boxing gloves. Awesome. It's running back and forth across the stage. He's our ball boy. I wondered where you went. Deviance the ball boy. Yes, there you go. So the idea with physical destruction was we were going to grind stuff down, hence the term physical destruction. We'll just kind of show a couple of videos here. So that's me. Shane's filming. That's why it's all jiggery like he's on meth. That's a hole saw designed to cut holes in sheetrock. That's not sheetrock. Yes, I am serious. Look, dude, we're in my garage. I'm like, what do I have? I got a hole saw. All right. That's a 3,000 RPM on my drill press and me pulling down and it's hot as it turns out. Really fucking hot and absolutely nothing happens, which should not be surprising to most people in the room. Again, you're watching this video. It kind of scarred the surface and burned the wood underneath in case the hard drive was made of wood. We would have had massive success. Next thing we tried was a spade bit. Same basic premise. Drill press at 3,000 RPM. Using the right tool for the job. That's my motto. I'd like to point out we did have safety goggles on. Gloves, too. Gloves. Just in case something exploded. There's sparks. I got news for you. The sparks are not coming from the hard drive case. They're coming from the drill bit. So there's the drill bit. You'll see it. Oh, Shane's doing some math. Everything's cool. There it is. It's annealed and the points have been taken up. No, wait, wait. Come on. There we go. Yeah. It didn't look like that 30 seconds earlier. So, yeah, right tool for the job. Yeah. So we did try that just to prove that it would work. Because we were suspect of that whole process. We did drill an actual hole through the platter and then decided that this was all going to be a bad idea and it wouldn't work anyway. You know what we use? We use cobalt-tipped drill bits. Cobalt is fucking strong. We discovered that non-reactive as our friend and our foe, cobalt. Come back, Zink. Come back. The five people that got like the Simpson season three reference. Yay! Yes. Thank you. We're all old. This is slightly more appropriate tool. This is a metal grinding disc designed to grind through metal at 3,000 RPM on a drill press. Again, wearing... I think I've given up on the gloves at this point. I've decided that nothing is going to fly off and rip my fingers off. There's a lot of smoke with this. Mostly from the shit that's on the outside of the drive case. Absolutely really nothing happens. It scratched it really well. And that's about... Oh, and it burned the wood. There's a lot of smoke. It's kind of hard to pick up on this crappy meth-head camera, but... That's because it's not an iPhone. Oh. So why? You just burned yourself, man. That was...anyway. Brings up an issue. We did have time and size constraints and also cash. It's really hard to buy stuff at Home Depot that will make a hard drive go away. And that was kind of our deciding. We didn't want to have to get licenses for anything. And we didn't want to have to get overly exotic where I was spending tens of thousands of dollars to buy really expensive drills and things like that. So we decided to move on. And while we're sitting in Home Depot, literally in front of the toilet section, because we're examining all the chemicals that are in all the toilet unstoppable things to get all the poop out and try to see if anything in there might react with metal. They make a drain-o now that gets hot in the drain. It's cool. It comes in a box and a bag and it's got two parts. It's like a binary liquid and you pour it in your drain and it gets really hot. I shit you not. Does that seem like a good idea to you? You really want to pour stuff into the innards of the house that you own that gets really hot and burns the hair off the inside of your pipes? If you do, please film it. So we're sitting there looking at the drain-o examining the contents of the drain-o and realizing it's all the same shit just different prices. And what we thought hey, what if we threw this stuff in some sort of ionic solution and ran a battery charge through it and maybe we could see if we could de-plate. So a real quick primer and this is later but there's two types of hard drive platters that we found out. And our dry manufacturers aren't really I'll say transparent about telling you what's in the hard drives that you buy. Some hard drives are ceramic which is basically glass and has a very thin layer of some polymer on top and then it's got the actual plating, the metallic plating of the drive and then underneath that it's basically clear glass. The other ones are some sort of aluminum alloy usually or some sort of metal alloy from those parts aluminum and other stuff. Those are not ceramic but they still have some sort of plating on them. So we thought hey, we're going to de-plate these critters. So what do we need? We need a power source. I like to think we use a Tesla coil but in reality we use a couple of car batteries. Some leads and so I told my son hey, go inside and get the salt. And I thought he'd come out like a Morton salt thing. No, I brought out the good salt grinder out the dining room table. Oh yeah. Good enough. Hey Shane, can you clean that off with some phosphoric acid? So here's what happened. We've got actually what you can see here is the hard drive de-plating around the negative electrode in the solution. And around the positive electrode it's de-plated a little bit. But we're able to move the electrode around and actually remove pretty much everything off of it. And when we're done, we can remove it from both sides and you can see straight through the drive. So that's pretty effective. And this is the first drive we cracked open and this is what we started playing with. This actually turns out to have been a problem. Because we spent a lot of time with the drive platters from that drive trying to understand how to make that go faster, how to be able to get the 60 seconds. And we're like well we need fluids that conduct electricity better and we need more juice and we need bigger electrodes. So we had 12 volts out of a what initially was a radio shack power DC power generator. So then we went with instead two car batteries and garden stakes and some jumper cables. So this is decidedly entering the realm of maybe not a good idea. Anyone ever welded with car batteries before? Yeah, you can do it. We were trying not to. Really hard. That's all that happens. So that we really thought like we like this is where I had the kids literally like in another school district like they were they had left the area. And we depleted it about the same rate that we depleted with a 13 volt 19 amp DC power supply from radio shack. So this was much more nerve racking and someone's going to say hey you should use larger. Oh shit. You should use larger electrodes. We did. We actually ground one of those down on the grinding wheel and put it right on it and really didn't make that much of a difference. So so we play around, play around, play around. And we were trying to figure out ways to engineer like jamming electrodes in from the side and how to flood using its pumps how to flood the saline solution and all this stuff. We cracked open the next drive and I went to de-plate it just to prove that we could do it. And absolutely nothing happened. And we cracked up another drive and absolutely nothing happened. And we discovered that the only drive we had that was ceramic was the first one. And everyone else that we had was aluminum. So we had all these drive platters and the solution engineered and he came over with all these pumps and we're all excited because we're going to have this all done and no we're not. We were going to have an actual demo. Yeah we're not going to have any kind of demo at all. So they don't de-plate the same way. But what they do do, drink, is they don't have a proper propane belt. So we decided God bless it. Jesus. I'm going to stand over here and give a talk. So what we did is we took first we took propane and this will not be a surprise to anyone. But the propane holy shit I can't make this place. There it is. Propane and propane accessories. That's my Texas accent right there. It sounds like my normal voice because I can't do it. So this is a really shitty video. Off frame. I was looking at something else. Sorry. James was doing a line of coke for that one. So this will melt. I sped it up because it took about a minute and a half to do it. And it turns into a little melty blob of aluminum which shouldn't be surprising. What's interesting is the curry point which is the point at which the stuff that they use to plate the hard drives becomes non-magnetic. The curry point for the material that they use is about 800 degrees centigrade. So propane burns at about 2,000 centigrade. So in reality as much as that drive melted, well before it melted the surface temperature of the drive had reached the curry point and it was no longer magnetic. So again, the drive was destroyed and you can destroy a drive with heat very effectively. The problem is it's not a very good demonstration. It's like watching crypto. Hey, we just reached the curry point. Yeah, it's really exciting when it gets to the curry point. I did that twice now. We're going to go for a third later. So what happened? So we tried to get spinning flying molten aluminum. That was actually a goal of ours. You could take a power supply out of a PC and plug in a hard drive and then if you short circuit the green wire to any black wire on the power supply, it's on and it will light up all the 12 and 5 volts power out of the power supply. So I had an old PC. I pulled it out and did that and it actually works. People done that before? It was a neat little trick. Green to black and you can just turn on the power supply. And so we went in and we took the top off a hard drive and then we took some propane torches. Several of them and held them down against the hard drive platter and nothing happened. And we waited and we waited and we waited. And about five minutes later we gave up. The drive is clearly hot. The heads had melted and we're like etching a little hole in it. But the hard drive was still spinning and nothing had melted. So the actual force of the 7200 RPM drive and the amount of time that's actually underneath the flame it cools very rapidly. The flame doesn't really have the ability to hit the surface of the platter to the ground effect of the spinning platter. And we couldn't burn it while it was on which was really unfortunate because we thought we can get a video of spinning flying flaming aluminum all over my driveway. That would be really cool. It didn't happen. So what did we go for next? We went for map gas. Anyone ever use map gas? People were like, yeah, that shit's hot. That didn't get shit. That didn't get a goddamn thing. Burned my finger on my butt and nobody last. Because it wasn't funny. It's a thousand degree centigrade hotter than propane. What's cute is it's not made in North America anymore and you can't buy it. You can buy map replacements that are basically like it but it's basically settling mixed in with some other good stuff and it burns hot very efficiently. But the only plant that made it shut down in 2008. And the stuff that we had fell off the back of a truck. That's what my neighbor said. It's like it fell off a truck and I'm like whatever dude like I don't really care. I don't want to even know like how you got this stuff. But this is what never mind. I'm not even going to go there. Someone go get priest. It sounds like your garage. Oh I thought you meant like you could hear acoustically like it sounds like. Is that my Mazda? Shane kept asking why you playing this heroin music. Apparently it wasn't fast enough for the method he was doing. So we decided we're going to hit this thing with map gas. Unsurprisingly when we speed it up it's actually a lot faster. Did you just say that? Yeah. The shit burned the hole right in the drive. And actually it goes really fast. Now Shane is really swinging out here. It turns into a slag pile of aluminum. It really just destroyed. Things catch fire periodically that you see like the heads glowing red periodically. By the heads there's plastic that's melted all over it. All the solder smokes up at once. I also like how the video is upside down. This is. Yeah. Anyway we ran out of map gas. So the map that fell off the truck was all gone. So Madame Curie uses Sarah Palin. See it shows up fine. This was him. I think he photoshopped it himself. No you betcha. So the idea that we came up with and I'm looking really excited about doing this was a fixing a glow plug for like a motorbike to the end of a propane torch and then use a servo to open said propane torch and then lighting the propane torch remotely with an Arduino and an ethernet connection. By God the most difficult way ever to light a propane torch. Yeah. There was a lot of effort that went in to you know code stepping the servo and everything and it was like oh this is going to be awesome and I said I don't know how this is going to work but okay. And then I got a call the next day and said you know this shit ain't going to work. This isn't going to work I give up. I do want to finish this though because I'd actually like because you had to sit through this talk for you to be able to go to a website and click a button and turn a propane torch on and off in my house. I'm going to put it in the middle of the fire place for safety and just watch it and watch the propane torch turn on and off. I think that sounds like a good time. It sounds like an appropriate way to end the talk. So ultimately we kind of ran out of time. The glow plug did not reliably light. I put some big capacitors on it was spark and created basically a spark plug over the top of the propane torch and that worked periodically as well but I didn't have access to really big caps. So it's not it honestly for the Arduino code that will give you will release it's like 40 lines of code to light the servo up and spark gap the thing and basically weaponize propane torch because that's what everybody wants to do. Conveniently that's legal. I don't know what he did whatever. So it's going to mount from the top, sprayed in, it's not complicated. I'm sure you understand physics and Legos and shit. We're going to do it mind storms actually. Teachable moments. Most drives we found were aluminum. PS3 drives are ceramic and other what other ones were ceramic? So there's a Japanese company that I'm going to have to talk to that and see just how trusting they are of my stupid ass to see who all they supply and what they supply. But they're one of the bigger manufacturers of ceramic platters in Japan. So I know that they supply the PS3 drives. We'll see what else that they do. So what? Hitachi. It wasn't people that make the platters. It's not people make the drives. Totally different separate organizations. Learn about supply chains. It'll be great for you. Not nearly belligerent. You'll notice something when we had the map gas on that platter. The dry platter melted but the freaking case didn't. Cases are really resilient. Top and bottom. Like hard drives are hard. That's really what I learned. Like the name is appropriate. The summarize. Woodworking tools. This is a surprising one. Don't far well against metal. What's up on the time? I was having a little antenna making event at my house. No, that's not a euphemism. And we were making Yagi antennas. People made Yagi antennas out of like threaded rod and copper pipe and washers before. Yeah. Okay. Just humor me. Yeah. It's not complicated. You set a washer like an inch and a quarter apart separated by copper tubing over this threaded rod and you stick it into like a PVC thing with an antenna and connector in the bottom and you have yourself a homemade Yagi of some arbitrary gain sometimes lost depending on how bad a job you did it. So I had five or six people in my shed. This is my shed when I lived in Virginia which looked a lot worse than my garage and had a lot of sawdust in it. And we were all cutting these parts and I assigned this one guy. I'm like, hey, dude, the bandsaw, you need to swap out the blade and the bandsaw to the metal one and then cut the all thread, the threaded rod to like 15 inch segments. He says, okay. And so he's got gloves on safety. And when I said metal saw blade, he just actually thought, you know what? I'm just going to put on a metal saw blade as if a saw blade would be made of something other than metal. So he grabbed one and he put it on and admirably actually got it aligned and everything. And then he started pushing this thing against it. And like a minute later, I look over, there's sparks flying everywhere. And he hasn't even made his first cut. I'm like, what the fuck are you doing, you guy? So I walk over and I grab that threaded rod with both hands. It was hot. It was really damn hot. And I had the flavor seared in 10. I'm on it, man. I appreciate it. What bullshit that the flavor was seared in that is bullshit that he did. He didn't learn his lesson at all. Actually, my flavor's always seared in. That's kind of what the hell that's that's not even funny. If you looked at the saw blade when he was done, it was a sine wave like it was he totally annihilated. It was for wood. It was not for metal. Metal also gets hot when flames applied. There were at least a number of times, Jane gets into this in a minute that I grabbed something that had moments earlier had a flame applied to it for like five minutes. And I'm like, oh, shiny. And I grabbed it. And then I would say, damn, it's still hot. And then conveniently the pizza showed up later and the pizza guy handed me the pizza and just thought he said, damn, it's still hot. The platter, if you scratch it first, the acids are moderately effective. But they do still the ones we were using that we got, you know, again, retail going to your local suburbia, you know, wasteland and buying stuff. It burned through really slowly. Aluminums crystallize at a curvy point when they hit about 800. They're nuked. Glove plugs get hot if they don't even glow. If you apply current to something and it gets hot, it doesn't necessarily have to be red hot to be hot, you know, like everything you ever put on the stove, you know, pans, they're hot, but they're not red. It didn't really dawn on me when I'd been applying to a current, to a glow plug for a while, then I grabbed it and seared the flavor in it. That's still hot. Fun facts. Now it's still hot. She kept asking, do you think we should put some safety goggles on for this? And I'm like, ah, yes, yes, I think it's a good idea. Although, well, it was really funny. We didn't put it in. He was trying to pipette. Fancy term. Pipette, give me a definition. Finger over the straw. Yeah, like a year drive. Like you use like capillary, you know, whatever you pick water, whatever it is up in the little thing you just drew. In this case, it was battery acid. Yeah, and he's got battery acid. And so he's trying to pipette it with like a little tiny hose. And then he's got these big rubber like, you know, gloves. Dishwashing gloves. I'll call them dishwashing gloves. Not what I'd use them for, but that's what I said. Pleasure gloves. And they had like little corrugations on the end of it. And so that he's got a big hose and he's trying to pipette with a big hose. And like now we have battery acid like running all over the table. And he's like trying to do it faster. There's battery acid going everywhere. And then he says, fuck it for science. And he picks it up and just pours it in. There we go. So when he gets frustrated, his sense of risk aversion kind of changes. So just a little the not, not against the HOA rules to blow stuff up. I actually live one lot over from a homeowners association so I can park the pinto in my front yard and no one can say shit to me which is great. I hit, wow. So my, I, we hit the hard drive platters with a 12 pound sledge repeatedly to see if we could get them to cleave especially after like we figured maybe they're brittle after we, we, we lit them up really hot and they cool rapidly. It might have tempered the aluminum. No it didn't. And conveniently I hit it with a hammer very, very loudly outside. And then my car alarm went off for a completely disjoint reason. And my wife actually called down and said, is everything okay? Because that sounded like an explosion. I'm like, no, no, no. Keep in mind she called. Yeah. It wasn't actually worth coming out of the house. Like if I didn't answer, then maybe, you know. So here's the kicker. We failed. We failed in a big gnarly nasty way. And you sat through 45 minutes fucking failure. Awesome! That's what Defconn Friday's all about. Yeah, one person's excited. The rest of you like, we're going to beat them up in the alley later. We're going to get Lawrence Fishburne and we're going to redo that scene from 21. Yeah, that's you. So here's the deal though. The first person that makes a device that meets the challenge requirements that we have and does not harm themselves or sue us, will get free access to Dishmook on 2011. 2012, 2012, sorry. Not in the past. I don't have my time machine handy. We like to think that you've learned something from this. At the end of the day, one of the things we wanted to underscore is how valuable the information on your hard drive really is. And some of the drive destruction standards that we looked at aren't the most recent things in the world and there's been very large advances on how bits are stored in hard drives, the density of the bits in the drives, materials that are used and things like that. And so the cute ways that we destroy hard drives and try to overwrite, somebody said, I saw on Twitter they were trying to securely erase their hard drive and it was like a half a terabyte drive and they were going on hour 36. Wow. Seriously? Curie point. Like take out the propane torch, hold it there for five minutes, 800 degrees, your drive's done, you don't need to worry about it, throw it in the trash, hand it to some random stranger and say take it, it's dead. We really need to examine how we destroy data. I mean, there's lots of people that don't, but people in this room are smart enough to. And we like to find ways to do it in more assured fashions that are maybe non-conventional. So if you're interested in learning, we can give you more details about what we did. We're happy to provide you with more technical details. We are not liable for anything that you may do. And we actively encourage you not to break the law when you do this. And also, this is not to get away from the law. So anyone live in central Maryland, major D.C. area? Yeah, probably, but you don't like to admit it. The Montgomery County, the guy that runs Montgomery County in the D.C. area, he was kind of corrupt. He was taking lots of bribes and things under the table. And the feds had been onto him for a while. His wife was involved, some council people, a lot of local contractors, that kind of thing. They had his house bugged and they decided that they were going to finally have enough evidence and they were going to go arrest him. And they found out, the guy found out because the cops had showed up at his office trying to arrest him and he wasn't there. And he found out that they were coming to his house. So he had his house bugged and things came out in the bug like, hey honey, stuff $50,000 in cash in your panties and flush all the checks down the toilet. Okay? This is recorded for posterity, plus she had $50,000 stuffed in her crotch. So, cut. Yeah, yeah, I said. It was in ones. They were reenacting that scene from 21. Jesus. It turns out that usually by the time they're coming to get you, they already know that they have their case one. So don't do something stupid. Like deal with the judicial system, don't delete data for evidence and things like that. That's bad. We're not encouraging that. We're looking at doing this strictly for, hey, there are bad guys out there. And we know pretty well this day and age that the bad guy problem is real. And we'd like to make sure data gets destroyed appropriately, even under large situations of duress. So that's that. Real quick, once again. Cycle override already went over this. So did anyone here actually go on the ride? No, yes. One guy. Yes. Thank you, sir. One. You OK today? You survived? All right. Yeah. Excellent. I encourage anyone who is able to bike come out next year. And like I said, we'll be doing. Oh, fuck, fuck. I'm not even saying important guys like. Jesus. Really? Oh. So in summary, go sign up for Hack Fortress and go ride a bike. And there you go. Anyway, that's it. Thanks, folks.