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This article might be handy for someone interviewing at that firm (Red Balloon) that sends you a "weird" hard drive as the interview CTF? I still have it sitting around but it arrived around finals season so I never really looked at it, but since they bothered to send a whole drive and SATA-USB adapter, it obviously must have something to do with the drive itself.

If someone had a ton of money, it would be funny to just send the thing to a data recovery lab, have them swap the platters onto an unmodified model and get a raw image of the data to work with. (Or maybe the key is hidden inside the drive firmware chip itself?)

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red_balloon

16 minutes ago

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Appreciate the (unaffiliated) shout out! No comment on the drive recovery idea...

The fundamentals in the article are all relevant to the hard drive challenge, though the actual multi-step solution to our CTF is rather different.

If hacking hard drives sounds intriguing to you, we're hiring reverse engineers and security researchers! See our whoishiring posts and careers page for details:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47977643

- https://redballoonsecurity.com/careers/

Be sure to mention Hacker News if you apply.

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boricj

10 minutes ago

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There's also another very good series of articles about hacking the firmware of a HDD, with modifications of /etc/shadow hashed passwords: https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack