destroying cisco gear

The company I used to work for would get requests to destroy cisco hardware.
Could anyone explain to me why someone would ask for this? If someone would have wanted the data off the gear, couldn't they have overwritten whatever data they had on the gear? Then resold the hardware for parts.

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Comments

tiersten

In some companies it is policy to completely destroy any hardware which has contained confidential information. In this case it would be the network configuration.

It is easier to just destroy it than to actually check that it has been wiped with no possibility of recovery. We yank all the HDs out of the machines we junk. I don't think we've ever destroyed any networking gear though but then again, it generally just gets chucked into a big pile in one of the store rooms.

Think of the number of stories about how somebody has bought an old PC or storage device off eBay/whatever and then found it contains vast amounts of private information. If somebody was careless and sold a router which contained all the IP addresses and security keys for their network then you'd have similar issues.

ccie15672

I can say I worked for a plac ethat did this stoo.

Wow. Need less beer i nfuture.

Basically there was theis big metal shreader that we threw that **** into.

jamesleecoleman

Thanks for the response. The gear had to be taken apart and then the pieces had to be tracked before being destroyed. We weren't lucky enough to have a shreader back then.

pitviper

I punch all old hard drives with a drill press.

Some of the 2811s that I purchased off of the bay (same seller – was a big retail chain “refresh”) were reset to factory defaults…but some idiot either did a “copy run flash:” or was deploying a bunch of routers and copied the configs on the flash from a PC. Needless to say there was a bunch of info on there that probably should have been removed. These evidently weren’t on a WAN either so lots of public IP address info. I wiped them clean but someone certainly would have lost their job if I sent a letter to corporate headquarters!!

Good reason why some companies elect to destroy old network equipment.

eMeS

I've worked for/with places where we had to store the equipment/discs for a period of time. After that time period was up (usually 7 years), it was then physically destroyed.

Typically anything that deals with Social Security #'s, bank account #'s, etc...then these organizations spend time/money tracking the certificates of destruction....

MS

jamesleecoleman

A guy at my old job used to punch holes using a drillpress into the harddrives. We also had to take HDD's apart piece by piece which was kinda fun because I got to see all the parts in the harddrive. I've also had to destroy cd's/dvd's using a razor blade. The best part was taking backup tapes and running over them with the highlow

Anyways, taking the cisco equipment apart would have been great exposure for me.

steve13ad

We have a policy to remove the hard drives out of any equipment destined for surplus.

One of the other engineers collects the PC/laptop hard drives to use as skeet/target practice at his farm.

SephStorm

think of all the labs that could be built

You could train homeless people to be CCIE's!

dynamik

SephStorm wrote: »

think of all the labs that could be built You could train homeless people to be CCIE's!

A guy I know was telling me how a nation-wide organization was shredding PALLETS of 3550s. The number was in the upper-hundreds, if not thousands. I believe they just moved everything to 3750s and needed to trash those. Oh well...

Mrock4

My gear that just arrived a week or two ago for my rack, a couple of the routers still had some old configs (presumably saved as backups? I don't know..)..no good, that is for sure.

I once saw a gov't auction for a pallet full of 3550's. I wanted to buy it, if for anything to just resell them on ebay. They sold for like $1,200 in the end. Not bad if you consider there was probably 30 3550's there. The only downside is the condition was pretty much unknown, and AS-IS. Still, I would venture to say that at least half of those worked fine, if not more.