Security quotes of the week

Posted Nov 30, 2012 23:33 UTC (Fri) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link]

someone did a very bad job at procuring shredders.

Indeed. They shredded the documents into strips, and whoever did the shredding fed them in sideways, so each strip contained one line of text. Bruce Schneier's blog entry has some good comments.

More worrisome, though, is that a DARPA challenge has now given us OCR-assisted shred reassembly, good against cross-cut shreds. If you're worried about a large entity (nation-state, corporation, police department) reading your stuff, burning is the only way to do it. (Back when I worked at a facility with classified documents, there was a very rusty 55-gallon drum out back for precisely that purpose. :-)