August 24
Thieves Attempt to Deep-Six Data
You wouldn’t expect this situation to come up, but then again, most (many?) data loss disasters aren’t expected. We see natural disasters involving tornadoes, fires, earthquakes, heavy storms and the resulting water-damaged hard drives, burnt computers, and power-outage crashed hard disks….. but it’s the odd ones that come along every so often that get us.
A gang of high-tech thieves broke into the house of a recent customer. A quick smash-and-grab followed where the thieves quickly targeted a hidden wall-safe and assorted valuables and were back out a broken window in less than 4 minutes, all while a CCTV security system happily recorded their progress.
With no outcry as the alarm had been disabled, the arrogant crew returned three hours later to “finish” the job. During this return to the scene of the crime however, the discovered the DVR capturing their movements. Nothing a little more smashing couldn’t take care of, but now there was cause for concern. They inspected the house for anything looking remotely like video storage and found our customer’s two media-streamer NAS units, full of all their music, home movies, and precious family photos.
Being too heavy to risk carrying away, the thieves quickly hatched a submersive plan: throw them in a bathtub full of water, hoping to wash their crimes away.
It didn’t work.
At CBL we often receive drives damaged in a flood situation, and our thieves had probably heard of this before. But flood-waters are usually heavily contaminated, filled with the detritus of mud and soil and everything picked up by rushing waters and swept away in its path. A nice clean dip in the bathtub was almost refreshing for these hard drives. After arriving at our facility we quickly cleaned the units and dried the surfaces, resulting in a quick, clean recovery.
Recovered:
1 x NAS storage device, hard drives submerged in bathtub
Category: case studies, data recovery
Tags: flood damage, nas recovery, photo recovery, pictures, theft, thieves, water-damaged hard drives
