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March 19, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

12:32

All your hard drives will be FRIED in an EMP attack

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	Alright, listen carefully.
	I've got a hugely important tip for you that's going to save your ass in the next natural disaster, EMP attack, grid down scenario, cyber warfare attack, whatever.
	Here's, you know, all of us have to make backups, right?
	Whether we're individuals, we make backups of our favorite photos, I guess, or whatever you have on your computer.
	And if you're a company, you're, of course, making backups of all this mission-critical business data.
	And, you know, if you're some kind of online service provider, you're making backups constantly.
	Or if you're a bank, even, right?
	Everything's in a database or hundreds of databases.
	And you're making backups.
	Now, most people are making backups onto magnetic media.
	Magnetic media includes hard drives and backup tape and also flash drives or flash SD cards or solid state drives, SSDs, right?
	Now all of these devices, oh and by the way, the point of this talk is that you're making a huge mistake.
	It's all going to be wiped out.
	All your backups are going to be gone if there's an EMP attack.
	It's going to destroy all your data.
	But I have a solution for you and that's what I'm going to mention.
	But let's understand the physics involved here.
	Magnetic storage uses little tiny magnets on the heads of the hard drive, for example.
	To put a charge on a very tiny magnetic particle that's on the surface of the hard drive, the platter that's spinning.
	It has a lot of little bits, and those bits are pushed into either a positive or negative magnetic direction.
	Maybe it's positive and neutral.
	I don't know.
	I'm not a hard drive designer, but let's just call it positive or negative.
	It's a bit, right?
	And it's changed electromagnetically.
	Now, the very high storage hard drives that we have today, very high storage density, where one little tiny drive can store, you know, four terabytes, which is astonishing.
	It accomplishes this by having really, really tiny bits.
	I mean, physically super small.
	And very, very tiny changes in the electrical polarity of those bits that's being induced by the head.
	The writing head.
	And then being read later by the same head reading.
	Well, because these bits are so tiny, they're incredibly sensitive to electromagnetic interference.
	Hard drives are also sensitive to electromagnetic degradation.
	A hard drive just sitting there that's not being scrubbed, as it's called in the industry, will start to lose data bits.
	Now, I know a lot of people don't think about this.
	They don't understand that hard drives, if you just put them on the shelf for five years and then you try to read the files, you may be missing like 2% of all the bits, which for a lot of files makes them unreadable.
	So hard drives use what are called parity bits.
	To help reconstruct lost data, this is really part of the low-level hard drive writing and reading protocol.
	Parity is used throughout.
	It's parity, P-A-R-I-T-Y, not parody like satire.
	Ha ha ha, isn't that funny?
	You lost a bit.
	No, it's a checksum, basically.
	Data integrity.
	You think that you have safely stored your data because let's say you have a RAID 5 array on a central storage server in your company.
	You think you're rocking.
	You've got a backup system.
	You've got a hot spare hard drive on your RAID system.
	Maybe two hot spares.
	You're all set.
	Your data can't be lost.
	It's being stored on this kick-ass RAID storage server.
	Totally redundant.
	Or hey, you've stored some of it in the cloud too.
	Well, guess what?
	In the cloud, your data is probably stored on hard drives.
	Somewhere, on some server, somewhere across the country, hard drives that use little tiny magnetic bits, just like your hard drive at home.
	Now, an EMP weapon is not only capable of frying the electronics of the interfaces, that is the circuitry that controls the hard drive.
	EMP If it's strong enough, it may also alter the data on your hard drive.
	Remember, all it takes is a strong enough magnetic field to erase the data on your hard drive.
	That's how you do some erasing, is you take a very strong magnet You wipe the hard drive with a strong magnet, thereby destroying all the data on it.
	This is one of the ways that you cleanse hard drives before throwing them away, let's say.
	Now, an EMP weapon may not have that strong of a magnetic field as a handheld device, but it only needs to degrade your data by, let's say, 5% to really make your files largely unreadable, or 10%.
	And nobody knows for sure exactly How strong of an electromagnetic field it takes to destroy hard drives.
	But if your data is on magnetic media, you're taking that risk.
	And it's an unknown risk because we don't know exactly what voltage potential is going to be rippling down through the atmosphere in an EMP weapon attack.
	So what's the solution?
	The solution is optical storage.
	Optical storage, which includes DVDs or Blu-ray DVDs, You know, writable Blu-ray, or at the high end, something like a Sony optical drive, which is like a $5,000 drive, that can hold, I think, like one, one and a half terabytes, something like that, on a cartridge.
	Optical storage is immune to EMP. Optical storage is immune to fluctuations in the electromagnetic field.
	Now an EMP can fry the interface electronics of an optical drive, but it can't fry the media.
	Optical uses a laser to alter the reflective pattern of tiny little bits of, let's call it plastic, on the surface of the media.
	In other words, if you take a DVD, there are tiny little bits in the plastic that are either turned on or off by writing on those bits using a laser, a right head.
	And then any kind of reading head can read which bits are on or off because of their reflectance potential in reflecting a laser at a certain wavelength.
	And that's why Blu-ray is called Blu-ray because it uses a laser at the wavelength that's typically called blue, which is a smaller wavelength, meaning you have a tighter resolution of bits on the media itself.
	Now, these drives also use parity bits like we talked about in electromagnetic media, meaning there is some data check some capability on the optical media as well.
	But the good news is you can take a Blu-ray disc or a DVD that you've stored all your family photos on or your business database or whatever you've stored it on.
	You can take this and you can throw it in the shower.
	You can wash it with water.
	You can get mud on it, wash it off, rinse it off, dry it off, stick it back in.
	It works.
	Optical media can survive a flood.
	It can survive quite a lot of heat, but not, obviously, melting heat.
	If you melt it, your data goes with the melting.
	However, it's quite resistant to heat, but most importantly, it's resistant to EMP and electromagnetic type of attacks.
	So if you're trying to protect something and you're storing whatever you're trying to protect on electromagnetic media, hard drives, tape, and so on, you're basically screwed in a sufficiently large EMP attack that sets off a strong enough electromagnetic wave to alter hard drive bits.
	And I don't know how strong that wave has to be I don't know the exact physics calculation.
	Maybe someone can offer that.
	But I know that there is a risk associated with it, and that risk is zero when it comes to optical media.
	So the simplest thing that you can do, probably your computer right now has a writable Blu-ray drive on it, and you can simply buy write-once or, I think, rewritable Blu-ray media.
	And you can start running backups onto that optical media.
	You can store that media.
	And that's going to really last a very long time.
	10 years, 20 years?
	Easy.
	Maybe 50 years.
	Yeah, seriously.
	Where a hard drive after 50 years, it's garbage.
	It's useless.
	If you just write to a hard drive and set it on the shelf, and you try to read that hard drive 50 years later, forget it.
	Your data's gone.
	It's just eroded.
	But optical media?
	It's all still there.
	It's all still there.
	Not a lot of people are thinking about all this.
	This is one of the things that I do is I have a knack about thinking ahead, looking at the trends, seeing where things are going, solving future problems today.
	And of course, I'm into preparedness and my background is in software technology.
	So this is just an obvious thing that I wanted to share with you because it's something that I do.
	I store my backups on optical media.
	I don't trust hard drives, period.
	And I sure don't trust the cloud.
	Give me a break.
	The cloud.
	They call it the cloud because when something hits the fan, your data just floats away.
	Bye-bye.
	It's gone.
	If you're storing anything in the cloud, I'm sorry to say, I don't want to be insulting, but everything you store in the cloud is being data mined by the NSA. You're being surveilled.
	You don't have control over it, so the cloud is for suckers.
	Let me just put it that way.
	Nobody in the backup business relies on the cloud.
	It's a joke and it's a surveillance nightmare.
	And it could be one component of a redundant data backup strategy, but it should never be the primary component.
	It could be like your last-ditch backup.
	And if you're storing in the cloud and you're not encrypting your files before you send them to the cloud, I'm sorry, you're an idiot, okay?
	You've got to encrypt.
	If you're not encrypting, you might as well just put all your data on a hard drive and just mail it to the NSA. Because they're reading everything.
	Okay, so be smart.
	Be smart.
	Be prepared.
	And learn about optical media.
	And then find a way to securely store that optical media locally where you can keep it very, very safe.
	Like in a safe place.
	A fireproof safe would be even better.
	So I hope this is helpful.
	Thanks for listening.
	Check out my work at Newstarget.com and my other Health Ranger Report podcasts at HealthRangerReport.com.
	Check out Glitch.News for news about EMP, cyber warfare, and other things.
	Glitch.News.
	That's the website.

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