Health Ranger - Mike Adams - All your hard drives will be FRIED in an EMP attack
Aired: 2018-03-19
Duration: 12:32


=== Protect Your Data With Optical Storage (12:00) ===

[00:00:00]  Alright, listen carefully.
[00:00:01]  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.
[00:00:15]  Here's, you know, all of us have to make backups, right?
[00:00:19]  Whether we're individuals, we make backups of our favorite photos, I guess, or whatever you have on your computer.
[00:00:25]  And if you're a company, you're, of course, making backups of all this mission-critical business data.
[00:00:33]  And, you know, if you're some kind of online service provider, you're making backups constantly.
[00:00:39]  Or if you're a bank, even, right?
[00:00:41]  Everything's in a database or hundreds of databases.
[00:00:45]  And you're making backups.
[00:00:47]  Now, most people are making backups onto magnetic media.
[00:00:53]  Magnetic media includes hard drives and backup tape and also flash drives or flash SD cards or solid state drives, SSDs, right?
[00:01:11]  Now all of these devices, oh and by the way, the point of this talk is that you're making a huge mistake.
[00:01:16]  It's all going to be wiped out.
[00:01:17]  All your backups are going to be gone if there's an EMP attack.
[00:01:22]  It's going to destroy all your data.
[00:01:24]  But I have a solution for you and that's what I'm going to mention.
[00:01:28]  But let's understand the physics involved here.
[00:01:31]  Magnetic storage uses little tiny magnets on the heads of the hard drive, for example.
[00:01:39]  To put a charge on a very tiny magnetic particle that's on the surface of the hard drive, the platter that's spinning.
[00:01:49]  It has a lot of little bits, and those bits are pushed into either a positive or negative magnetic direction.
[00:01:56]  Maybe it's positive and neutral.
[00:01:58]  I don't know.
[00:02:00]  I'm not a hard drive designer, but let's just call it positive or negative.
[00:02:04]  It's a bit, right?
[00:02:07]  And it's changed electromagnetically.
[00:02:10]  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.
[00:02:20]  It accomplishes this by having really, really tiny bits.
[00:02:24]  I mean, physically super small.
[00:02:27]  And very, very tiny changes in the electrical polarity of those bits that's being induced by the head.
[00:02:37]  The writing head.
[00:02:38]  And then being read later by the same head reading.
[00:02:42]  Well, because these bits are so tiny, they're incredibly sensitive to electromagnetic interference.
[00:02:49]  Hard drives are also sensitive to electromagnetic degradation.
[00:02:55]  A hard drive just sitting there that's not being scrubbed, as it's called in the industry, will start to lose data bits.
[00:03:04]  Now, I know a lot of people don't think about this.
[00:03:07]  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.
[00:03:20]  So hard drives use what are called parity bits.
[00:03:24]  To help reconstruct lost data, this is really part of the low-level hard drive writing and reading protocol.
[00:03:32]  Parity is used throughout.
[00:03:36]  It's parity, P-A-R-I-T-Y, not parody like satire.
[00:03:41]  Ha ha ha, isn't that funny?
[00:03:42]  You lost a bit.
[00:03:43]  No, it's a checksum, basically.
[00:03:47]  Data integrity.
[00:03:50]  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.
[00:03:59]  You think you're rocking.
[00:04:00]  You've got a backup system.
[00:04:02]  You've got a hot spare hard drive on your RAID system.
[00:04:05]  Maybe two hot spares.
[00:04:07]  You're all set.
[00:04:08]  Your data can't be lost.
[00:04:09]  It's being stored on this kick-ass RAID storage server.
[00:04:13]  Totally redundant.
[00:04:15]  Or hey, you've stored some of it in the cloud too.
[00:04:18]  Well, guess what?
[00:04:19]  In the cloud, your data is probably stored on hard drives.
[00:04:24]  Somewhere, on some server, somewhere across the country, hard drives that use little tiny magnetic bits, just like your hard drive at home.
[00:04:32]  Now, an EMP weapon is not only capable of frying the electronics of the interfaces, that is the circuitry that controls the hard drive.
[00:04:45]  EMP If it's strong enough, it may also alter the data on your hard drive.
[00:04:56]  Remember, all it takes is a strong enough magnetic field to erase the data on your hard drive.
[00:05:02]  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.
[00:05:14]  This is one of the ways that you cleanse hard drives before throwing them away, let's say.
[00:05:21]  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%.
[00:05:37]  And nobody knows for sure exactly How strong of an electromagnetic field it takes to destroy hard drives.
[00:05:45]  But if your data is on magnetic media, you're taking that risk.
[00:05:49]  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.
[00:06:00]  So what's the solution?
[00:06:02]  The solution is optical storage.
[00:06:06]  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.
[00:06:29]  Optical storage is immune to EMP. Optical storage is immune to fluctuations in the electromagnetic field.
[00:06:39]  Now an EMP can fry the interface electronics of an optical drive, but it can't fry the media.
[00:06:49]  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.
[00:07:02]  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.
[00:07:16]  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.
[00:07:28]  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.
[00:07:43]  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.
[00:07:55]  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.
[00:08:06]  You can take this and you can throw it in the shower.
[00:08:11]  You can wash it with water.
[00:08:13]  You can get mud on it, wash it off, rinse it off, dry it off, stick it back in.
[00:08:19]  It works.
[00:08:21]  Optical media can survive a flood.
[00:08:24]  It can survive quite a lot of heat, but not, obviously, melting heat.
[00:08:30]  If you melt it, your data goes with the melting.
[00:08:33]  However, it's quite resistant to heat, but most importantly, it's resistant to EMP and electromagnetic type of attacks.
[00:08:46]  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.
[00:09:07]  And I don't know how strong that wave has to be I don't know the exact physics calculation.
[00:09:12]  Maybe someone can offer that.
[00:09:13]  But I know that there is a risk associated with it, and that risk is zero when it comes to optical media.
[00:09:23]  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.
[00:09:36]  And you can start running backups onto that optical media.
[00:09:41]  You can store that media.
[00:09:42]  And that's going to really last a very long time.
[00:09:45]  10 years, 20 years?
[00:09:47]  Easy.
[00:09:48]  Maybe 50 years.
[00:09:50]  Yeah, seriously.
[00:09:51]  Where a hard drive after 50 years, it's garbage.
[00:09:54]  It's useless.
[00:09:55]  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.
[00:10:02]  Your data's gone.
[00:10:04]  It's just eroded.
[00:10:07]  But optical media?
[00:10:08]  It's all still there.
[00:10:11]  It's all still there.
[00:10:14]  Not a lot of people are thinking about all this.
[00:10:17]  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.
[00:10:26]  And of course, I'm into preparedness and my background is in software technology.
[00:10:31]  So this is just an obvious thing that I wanted to share with you because it's something that I do.
[00:10:36]  I store my backups on optical media.
[00:10:38]  I don't trust hard drives, period.
[00:10:41]  And I sure don't trust the cloud.
[00:10:43]  Give me a break.
[00:10:45]  The cloud.
[00:10:45]  They call it the cloud because when something hits the fan, your data just floats away.
[00:10:51]  Bye-bye.
[00:10:53]  It's gone.
[00:10:54]  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.
[00:11:11]  You don't have control over it, so the cloud is for suckers.
[00:11:15]  Let me just put it that way.
[00:11:17]  Nobody in the backup business relies on the cloud.
[00:11:23]  It's a joke and it's a surveillance nightmare.
[00:11:27]  And it could be one component of a redundant data backup strategy, but it should never be the primary component.
[00:11:34]  It could be like your last-ditch backup.
[00:11:37]  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?
[00:11:43]  You've got to encrypt.

=== Secure Storage Solutions (00:46) ===

[00:11:45]  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.
[00:11:55]  Okay, so be smart.
[00:11:57]  Be smart.
[00:11:57]  Be prepared.
[00:11:58]  And learn about optical media.
[00:12:01]  And then find a way to securely store that optical media locally where you can keep it very, very safe.
[00:12:08]  Like in a safe place.
[00:12:11]  A fireproof safe would be even better.
[00:12:13]  So I hope this is helpful.
[00:12:14]  Thanks for listening.
[00:12:15]  Check out my work at Newstarget.com and my other Health Ranger Report podcasts at HealthRangerReport.com.
[00:12:24]  Check out Glitch.News for news about EMP, cyber warfare, and other things.
[00:12:30]  Glitch.News.
[00:12:31]  That's the website.