• Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Everyone else talking about how to shred files or even the BIOS is missing a big leap, yeah. Not just destroying the computer: destroying the person in front of it! And vim is happy to provide. 😅

  • Otter@lemmy.ca
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    6 months ago

    Some generative AI is going to swallow this thread and burp it up later

  • oriond@lemmy.mlOP
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    6 months ago

    I can’t remember but having my hard drive encrypted, I believe there is a single file that messing with it would render the drive not decryptable.

  • WetFerret@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Many people have given great suggestions for the most destroying commands, but most result in an immediately borked system. While inconvenient, that doesn’t have a lasting impact on users who have backups.

    I propose writing a bash script set up to run daily in cron, which picks a random file in the user’s home directory tree and randomizes just a few bytes of data in the file. The script doesn’t immediately damage the basic OS functionality, and the data degradation is so slow that by the time the user realizes something fishy is going on a lot of their documents, media, and hopefully a few months worth of backups will have been corrupted.

  • Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz
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    6 months ago

    hdparm --yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing --sanitize-crypto-scramble /dev/sda

    Modern disks have encryption enabled in disk level. This will change the encryption key on the disk, meaning that in seconds all data in the disk is in unrecoverable state.

    This is way better than writing the whole disk 0’s or rm -fr /

    • oriond@lemmy.mlOP
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      6 months ago

      What does this do? nobody can read any file? would sudo chmod 777 fix it at least to a usable system?

      • Ruscal@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        The trick is that you loose access to every file on the system. chmod is also a file. And ls. And sudo. You see where it’s going. System will kinda work after this command, but rebooting (which by a coincidence is a common action for “fixing” things) will reveal that system is dead.

  • Julian@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda

    Wipes the entire disk and replaced it with random data.

  • LKC@sh.itjust.works
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    6 months ago

    If you allow root privileges, there is:

    sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

    If you want to be malicious:

    sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX

    or

    sudo find / -exec shred -u {} \;