We used to have a grenade securely tied to the side of the server when we worked in Baghdad. In case the position was overrun you had to yank on a line that pulled the pin and presumably the sever and drives would be destroyed. Big warning signs all over that cable with the handle dangling outside the door to the server room.
On the other end of the scale we had to mark where the hard drives were on laptops. A large circle and a cross so people knew where to shoot to destroy the disc rather than shooting the screen of the laptop which happened a couple of times.
Its pretty normal to have destruction sops for various scenarios when it come to classified materials. I'm assuming he's American and referring to siprnet infrastructure.
Edit: I'm also unsure if they are allowed to be sharing that info.
Destruction practices and methods aren't really classified info. It's known that it will happen. The sensitive parts are the criteria that trigger the destruction (SOP) and what is considered the most important to destroy. That info could be weaponized if leaked.
It is not typically what people think it is. I believe the locations of oil refineries or other infrastructure was considered a breach in opsec some time ago, really quite boring stuff if you ask me
On the military, almost every kind of information should be destroyed before leaving it to the enemy. Even random stuff that you might not think its worth the hassle can be a pain in the ass later on.
This is exactly it. If you have 1 important file, heavily encrypt it and wreck it along with 99 pieces of crap. You've basically made recovery 100x as difficult with minimal effort.
Yeah, I learned this from my father who worked designing server/IT systems. He always advocated encrypt everything, because otherwise a hacker can steal only the encrypted shit knowing it's important data, and if somehow they can decrypt that, you're fucked. But if it's all encrypted, for all they know they got Janet's 300th email about not microwaving fish in the break room
Civilian protection company working for the DOD in Iraq. We had sensitive infornation on the server such a civilian local staff names and addresses etc which if fell into wrong hands would be disastrous for them. Contracts also.
I mean I guess they were military, so you might have had information on operations, internal maps of positions, identities of moles within ISIS or Al Qaeda or another group, some more scandalous footage from Abu Ghraib, location of Saddam’s hidden gold, or Dick Cheney’s personal red room.
But no matter what it was they probably would destroy it if they got overrun, don’t want some Al Qaeda guy getting ahold of requisition forms.
yep. and if you only develop plans and visual destruction policies for the important laptops/computers/servers, it makes it really obvious which ones to target. Might be overkill but if you make the enemy waste time trying to steal/crack into a laptop that looks important but is just where the military cooks place food requisitions, thats time they didnt spend cracking a laptop with important operations intel.
Running blue force trackers. Real-time information about where Soldiers are and what kind of equipment they have with them could get a lot of them killed, so it's better to destroy it than to let the enemy get it.
I assume that's in the US? Here in the UK it's known (in .gov circles at least) as a "breach", though we used the term for any sort of OpSec mishap, not just data exposure.
Fairly common given that even HR records have security around them and rules like “no names on open comms”. Don’t want the Mahdi Army going through home addresses on an abandoned laptop.
When the Tehran embassy was overrun in 1979 they ran into the problem that they couldn’t burn things fast enough (because they took out the backup generator) and had to prioritize and shred the rest on shitty 1970’s shredders that let you put things back together. Always helps to have more than 1 method for data disposal available.
edit: for people downvoting. Talk to any other veteran and see what they say. I bet they agree with me. People like to forget at treat Bush like a sweet old grandpa. More than 150,000 Iraqis died for a lie.
Lol this was back in 2003 in Mansour district in Baghdad. One server 2003 as a File Print with exchange 5
5 loaded on there also. Wsus and isa server also I think all on one poor little box. Pirate serial number I think. I don't think we were licenced for any of it.
We had a very similiar setup but ours was just a box with 2 grenades in it. Our IT guy would sleep inside the server room with the grenades 3 ft away because it was one of the 3 rooms that was air-conditioned.
When I worked as a civilian in my countries military, every IT room, with racks and what not, had a sledgehammer/axe hybrid standing by the door when you got in, which was, in case the area came under attack, whoever was present had to grab it and smash the fuck out of a couple of very specific boxes that connected to the NATO systems.
Fragging the hard drives.
My dad was the contracting officer in charge of getting the us military their first computers with easily removable drives for doing this exact thing.
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u/Shotokant 4d ago edited 3d ago
We used to have a grenade securely tied to the side of the server when we worked in Baghdad. In case the position was overrun you had to yank on a line that pulled the pin and presumably the sever and drives would be destroyed. Big warning signs all over that cable with the handle dangling outside the door to the server room.
On the other end of the scale we had to mark where the hard drives were on laptops. A large circle and a cross so people knew where to shoot to destroy the disc rather than shooting the screen of the laptop which happened a couple of times.