Episode 3 Bang Goes the Theory

Hello, good evening and welcome to tonight's show.

Here's a big number for you.

We spend over £10 billion a year upgrading our computers,

smartphones, hard drives, TVs

and with all your old kit destined for scrap heaps like this,

how can you be sure things like your bank details,

or your photographs or other personal information remain safe?

You might go through your old computers and phones

and delete the files before you chuck everything out, but how certain

are you that your data still doesn't end up in the hands of cyber crooks?

On tonight's show we go behind the headlines to reveal

the science of cyber security.

Coming up: Jem and Dallas

find out how hard it is to destroy computer files as they go

head to head with the data recovery experts.

-That's the sort of thing.

-Yeah, I usually find that does the trick with electronics!

Maggie Philbin joins us to test

whether phone hacking is any easier today than it was 30 years ago.

What we want to see is can we actually tap into the data

that goes in and out of their mobile phones?

'And I check out the cloud where it seems we're all

'storing our music, photos and personal information.'

Hard drives and memory sticks become obsolete, you need to keep changing them,

that's no longer a problem with the cloud. It just continues to grow.

But first, have a look at this.

This is a ton of discarded hard drives which are about to be crushed and shredded in that machine there.

I am looking at it wondering just how much personal information is sitting right here.

It makes you think.

It is terrifying just how much digital information

we collect about ourselves over the years.

Now this is an old BBC computer from the office which is going to

be thrown out today.

But I am opening it up and on it is some of my stuff, old scripts

articles I've written. Look at this for instance,

this is a call sheet which has a lot of personal information on it.

It has what everyone is doing. Liz Bonnin's phone number!

Let's do the responsible thing and let's pull that into the

recycle bin but as we know this can be emptied so let's delete that.

"Empty recycle Bin?"

"Are you sure, Dallas, you want to delete these items?" Yes, I am.

Job done... Or is it?

I'm off to meet a man who reckons he can access all those files

I just deleted.

You might think I am driving to MI5 or MI6 or somewhere like that,

I'm actually off to a little house in rural Suffolk.

Pete Warren is an investigative journalist on a mission to

warn us all about the dangers of throwing away computers.

It only takes him a moment to remove my hard drive

and plug it into his computer.

Even though I thought it was completely wiped,

in no time at all, he's browsing through my deleted documents.

As far as I was concerned, I had deleted it and it was gone but there it is.

So how easy is it to get all this data back?

I would say it is criminally easy.

Because, basically, all of that data still resides in the computer,

though there is now increasingly a criminal market developing in data.

If you go to Africa for example,

you will find that hard drives are 50% more expensive

if they have data on them.

One good example was somebody who sent his hard drive away,

thought it had been destroyed

and suddenly he received a phone call from some of the States

in the former Soviet Union, asking for, I think

it was around £300 for the recovery of some of his personal photographs.

'Which of course is blackmail.

'It just goes to show how important it is to properly delete your files.

'So why doesn't pressing the delete button work?'

I've come to the world leaders of data recovery to help me

understand a little bit more and to find out exactly what is going on inside my hard drive.

Now here is my question - why it doesn't delete mean delete?

If you think of this as your hard drive

and the pages are containing your files,

when you delete a file and remove it from your recycle bin,

what you are doing is just removing

the entry from the table of contents.

The link that you would normally have to the data is lost,

but the data is still there.

So that's the key,

saving a file leaves a physical trace on the desk which is not

affected by pressing delete.

So here you have a spinning platter just like a record,

and you have the armature here which would be the arm of the record player.

Then right at the end, very small, is the read/write head.

Instead of leaving grooves in the record, what happens is this

uses magnetic polarities to write the data to the disc.

OK, brilliant. Thank you.

for example, let us say I really, really want to get rid of the data

and perhaps I want to throw away a hard drive or computer and

I do not want it to get into the wrong hands,

is it just a case of getting physical with it?

Is that what I have to do, beat it up a bit?

That would be a way.

I would say that to really find out, why don't you go away

and find a few old computers and hard drives,

give them some physical abuse, bring them back here

and we will see how successful you have been.

That is a challenge. I will be interested to see how you guys get on.

'It's game on.

'So I've rounded up some gear destined for the scrap heap, five old computers,

'a memory stick and a portable hard drive.

'I'll load them all up with a selection of pictures that

'I'd rather no-one ever saw again.

'Now I am going to see how much it would take to completely wipe them.'

Oh! Bang Christmas party - that one might need to be destroyed.

'I think some extra muscle will help.

'So with my first electronic victim on a chopping block,

'I've also let Jem know it's loaded with dodgy pictures of him too.'

Yes, that is the sort of thing.

I usually find that does the trick with electronics.

That is a hard drive there.

This label lets us know what we're doing,

-we have hit that with a sledgehammer.

-10lb sledge.

Right, next.

I would've said that is not too bothered about life on the farm.

I think that is just a flesh wound.

Now, watch this drive.

One portable hard disk done for.

OK, that is simple brute force

but what about other things such as, water damage - fairly obvious.

That's the memory stick drowned. How about a powerful magnet?

Or even a quick blast of heat?

Your classic hard drive breakfast.

And if the toaster wasn't enough, then this should surely do the trick?

What about we reduce them to a molten mass?

That's seven hard drives done.

There is only one place where those photos now survive...

that is our memories.

Exactly.

Surely that has wiped off everything on those drives.

-I have no idea. We gave those a proper battering.

-You had far too much fun!

The guys in data security reckon,

I do not know how, they reckon they can get some of the information.

-Really!

-Apparently.

-We will find out later in the show if they do.

We are on Tottenham Court Road, London's biggest electronics

high street - the perfect place for you to buy a new hard drive.

-Yes, it is.

-But what about security on these things? Mobile phones.

The issue is not just about when you throw them away, it is

about people snooping on them while you are actually using them.

It is a question we've been worrying about since the 1980s when the first cordless phones came on the market.

Back then TV science uber-legend Maggie Philbin was on the case.

..Despite this sophisticated system, it is possible to home in on one person's call.

With that sort of pedigree, who better

to look at smartphone security?

'Mobile phones have changed enormously over the last 25 years.'

It's really funny to think that this was a social trophy,

particularly because the early models only delivered

30 minutes talk time. And because they were analogue,

with the right equipment it was quite easy

to eavesdrop on people's conversations.

But we all know about the recent phone hacking scandals.

Are today's multi-tasking smartphones

any safer than those old bricks?

Tom and Oliver are cyber security experts.

They specialise in securing the phones of celebrities

and they know that a smartphone's weak spot isn't so much voicemail

as when it's surfing the net.

While I'm out and about and using my mobile or iPad or whatever,

how could I be putting myself at risk?

Your phone will transmit data in two ways.

One is over a 3G network and generally it's fairly secure.

Wi-Fi, on the other hand, is fairly susceptible to hackers.

There's two primary ways they do this.

One of them is setting up what we call a bait network.

We're sat in a cafe here, they may set up a fake wi-fi network

and call it the same as the cafe we're sat in.

The other way is to monitor what phones in the area are looking for.

Phones are constantly looking for networks

that they've previously connected to.

So if you've got a wi-fi network called Maggie's Home, a hacker could see that

and imitate that network to attract your phone to connect.

Using specialist equipment,

Tom can easily detect those Wi-Fi request signals.

In just seconds, he's collected a huge list

from every person's phone in this shopping centre.

For privacy, we've blurred their details.

So here you've got number 11.

Now that's obviously someone who lives at number 11.

If you were to set up a fake network called number 11,

then that means that phone would connect it.

Yeah.

Once you've got control of that connection, then any data going

from that phone through your network and out to the internet

is up for grabs. So you can see that data

and you can manipulate that data and perform attacks.

What we're seeing is people harvesting login details

for social media, for email accounts, and then using that information.

Often people use the same username and password for different accounts.

So once you've got one, for something on a social media site,

that could potentially result in some security risks.

'I wanted to see how this could work in practice,

'but it would be illegal to do it in public.

'So Oliver and Tom have helped me

'set up a sting on a group of friends, pretending we're doing

'a medical experiment on the effects of social networking.'

Right, well we've told them that we're going to run a test.

And so we're taking their blood pressure

before and after they've done a bit of social networking.

Of course, we're not in the least interested

in what their blood pressure is. What we want to see

is can we actually tap into the data

that goes in and out of their mobile phones?

We've given them access to a local Wi-Fi network.

What they don't know is that it's one Tom

and Oliver have set up with a bit of fishing in mind.

CHATTERING

Pretty soon, they've harvested cookies and login details

from every phone in the room and it's time to set to work.

But first, we're going to lock their phones away safely.

Not to deprive them as they think,

but so Tom and Oliver can get hacking.

A few tweaks on Facebook and we're done.

The first thing I'm going to do is to reunite you

with your mobile phones.

I've got something of a confession to make here,

because we have just spent the last couple of hours trying

to hack into your mobile phones. And we did very well.

Harry, we've seen all of your Instagram pictures.

Electra, we know what you've been up to. Just to show you, Charlie,

could you just look at your Facebook profile?

"Bang Goes The Theory is my new favourite show."

And I have a profile picture change.

-Crazy!

-Is that your normal picture?

-No.

-And that was relatively easy to do, wasn't it?

-Yeah, it was.

A real hacker would take that information away,

spend a day analysing it

and, even after months, they can still log in as you using the packets of data

that they've captured during that time you were using

that infected Wi-Fi network.

How do they make sure that they do keep their personal data personal?

Ultimately, connecting to a free Wi-Fi network leaves you at risk,

because you don't really know who's on the other end of that network.

And our final tip -

make sure you use a different password for every website,

just in case you do accidentally log on to a hacker's network.

It might make you think twice next time you log on in a public place.

Absolutely. If you've got any worries or concerns,

loads more cyber security information on our website.

-Being careful obviously where and when you log on.

-Obviously, yeah.

Speaking of our website, time to hop over

to Dr Yan in cyberspace for another brain teaser.

How is our data kept safe when we send it over the internet?

Well, that's what this week's brain teaser is all about.

Imagine Alice here is using this train to exchange

secret messages with Bob down the line.

But like the internet, the train is full of prying eyes.

Like Evil Ed here.

Alice and Bob have padlocks to protect their messages.

But there's a problem.

Neither can send their key on the train in case Ed intercepts it.

What can Alice and Bob do to make sure their messages stay safe?

As ever, head to /bang for Dr Yan's answer.

And while you're there, follow the links to watch the film Yan

picked to win the British Science Association Prove It competition.

And make sure you visit the Open University for loads more information

about surviving online attacks and shopping safely on the internet.

Right, so far we've been talking about stopping

your digital information from getting into the wrong hands.

But here's another thought. How can we be sure

that we'll always be able to get our own hands on our files and photos?

All of this is stuff I've collected over the years.

Stuff I want to keep and hopefully pass onto my family

because it says a lot about my life.

I mean, this vinyl album is of Depeche Mode,

the first gig I ever went to.

And this is a collection of photographs from my first sighting

of a wild tiger, an event that completely changed my life.

So I definitely don't want to lose this.

Now as much as it's really cool to keep these,

we all know that vinyl records scratched and they broke and...

Oh, my gosh. Do you remember these? I used to make so many mixtapes.

But they used to unravel, do you remember?

You had to spool them back in with a pencil for ages.

So really, all this physical stuff is susceptible to wear and tear

and, of course, you can lose it.

So with the advent of new technology like hard drives and USB sticks,

I thought I was sorted.

I put all my tiger photos on this, my entire music collection is now on

this hard drive, and my whole master's course

is now on this tiny stick.

But are digital collections like this

any safer than the vinyl records and paper photos of the past?

Whether you keep your files on discs and drives,

on memory sticks or you upload them to the cloud for storage,

will you still be able to read them years from now?

'To find the answer, we need to go back in time, starting with

'something almost all of us have stored precious photos and music on.

'Since they came on the scene in the 80s - the CD.'

The surface is covered by a layer of transparent plastic,

so you don't have to worry about

grubby fingers or even scratches.

Now whether there's a market for this remains to be seen.

'Of course, CDs and DVDs did take off.

'But how well are they standing the test of time?'

Now there's a lot of debate as to the lifespan of DVDs.

Manufacturers say they can last up to 200 years,

but the US National Archive says they'll last anything from two

to five years, which really makes you think twice about using them

if you've got very important data to store.

If, like me, you think you're covered

because you're now using one of these, an external hard drive,

practical experience says they'll last up to six years.

The advice is maybe you should use another external hard drive to

back that one up, and then maybe another one for safety.

And it's not just decay we have to worry about. What about being

able to retrieve your data from storage in the future?

To find that out, I'm at the National Museum of Computing,

and some of these machines date back to the 40s.

Of course at the time, all of these were state of the art,

but back then, no one considered the trouble

we might have trying to read their files in the future.

This is a disc drive. It's one section of a disc drive.

-Now that's incredibly heavy.

-Is it?

-Oh, my lord! OK.

-But in terms of technology...

Do you have a drive for that in your house?

In terms of technology, it's exactly the same as the little

three and a half inch drive inside there.

-Hoe much memory on this bad boy?

-Oh, tiny.

-It's about one hundredth of one of these.

-Oh, my gosh.

So at least, you know, as technology improved...

Oh, good lord! I can't even lift it.

The size of the storage device got smaller,

-But the memory increased.

-Oh, yeah.

-And each generation has a smaller, more convenient format.

-Yeah.

And the capacity's gone up each time as our requirements

and our uses of the medium has changed.

-That's the sort of sort I started using in the '80s.

-Yeah.

When those floppy disc drives were produced,

nobody thought of storing digital pictures.

It was a few recipes and perhaps your address book.

Now, of course, we've got USB pens.

A USB pen like the one you're holding

is equivalent to something like

500,000 times the size of one of these discs.

'But of course, size isn't everything.

'Since it was introduced in 1996,

'the real benefit of the USB was to standardise hardware connections.

'But what's the chance of this system going out of date?'

Surely everything will always have a USB port.

Surely this is going to be a little bit more long-lasting

than a floppy disc?

No?

Our experience with machines here at the museum,

and even if we're just looking at...

home computing in the last 20, 30 years,

is that the technology changes radically at least every ten years.

I wouldn't guarantee that would work on your laptop in ten years' time.

It's a problem, because if you rely on just one of those

for all of your data, you could be in for a nasty surprise.

Good grief.

OK, so as an expert, Kevin,

what would you do to store your most precious data?

If you wanted to keep something for the next thousand years,

that would be the most reliable...

-You're kidding?!

-..on printed paper tape,

punched paper tape like this.

-You're kidding?!

-No!

-Seriously?

No, this is acid-free paper, it's punched raw digital format.

-Look at how lovely that is.

-It won't suddenly not boot one morning.

Where does this come from?

This one is about 70 years old,

and this tape was used to store German messages in World War II

to be replayed through the Colossus computer.

-This is Colossus.

-This is the Colossus computer.

So, I need one of these at home and some of this and I'm sorted?

-Plenty of this.

-Plenty of this!

-Indeed.

Of course, these days there is another way to store your photos

and your files that does away with discs and hard drives

and the need to update your hardware every couple of years.

It's called cloud computing

and involves storing your data in remote servers.

But is the cloud the answer to all our problems,

and more to the point, where is it?

Turns out it's in an industrial estate in Slough.

Well, a small part of it is, anyway.

Security is tight here.

We're not even allowed to film the outside of the building

in case it can be identified.

It's highly likely that you're using the cloud already.

Lots of people actually upload pictures

to things like Flickr, YouTube,

where, you know,

there's about 48 hours of video that is uploaded every single minute.

Or your e-mail.

Your e-mail is a cloud service

where the information is stored in a data centre like this.

You're probably using the cloud a lot today already.

And can we even hazard a guess

as to how much memory the entire cloud is storing?

The cloud's a relatively new technology,

only really invented a few years ago,

and the amount of data which we're storing in our cloud

is doubling every six months.

-Oh!

-So, very, very difficult to actually add it up.

I mean, if you look at the technology,

it's gone from gigabytes to terabytes to petabytes to exabytes.

In this data centre, we have three rooms like this.

Globally, we've got nine data centres bigger than this one.

We host about eight billion files -

pictures, videos, or documents - so a lot of info.

OK. But essentially, all these rows are made up of hard drives too,

so how can you ensure that these hard drives

don't break down in the same way as my home one might?

They CAN break, but the beauty of this technology

is that already this data's replicated in three different areas,

so none of your information will be lost.

You know, this is a very important facility,

cos we've got people like TfL, Transport for London,

and the Oyster card,

-where all that information gets stored here as well.

-OK.

So, Fabio, is the cloud the future?

Can I put my data in here and continue to do so until the day I die

and not have to worry about keeping up with the technology

or the fact that it might break down?

Hard drives and memory sticks become obsolete.

You need to keep changing them.

That is no longer a problem with the cloud.

It just continues to grow.

But handing over your digital property

to someone else for safekeeping

raises important questions.

Who owns the files, for a start?

And will you be able to pass them on to members of your family?

These are issues the data storage world has only just begun to address.

So, the cloud's pretty safe? What do you think?

It's the safest thing, I guess,

but good idea to back up your data on another hard drive as well.

Not just A hard drive - several hard drives.

And print out your photos on good, old-fashioned paper.

-And leave one of the hard drives at your mum's house.

-Really good idea.

-There are people who have lost data and people who will lose data.

-Deep!

That's what they say.

OK, earlier on in the show, Jem and I were having a smashing time

trying to erase data from some hard drives.

We took them to the data recovery boys. Let's see how they got on.

Right.

That's nice. Wow!

The contents of this cardboard box...

-Dropped in tea.

-..are all that's left

-after our enjoyably destructive afternoon.

-Nice and toasted.

Doesn't look too bad.

Oh, that's nice.

Been playing golf with this one.

These guys are data recovery masters

and they can piece together damaged drives

and read what's on them using their own specialist software.

But I'm pretty confident

we're going to end up with more write-offs than rescues.

-We had an interesting and satisfying day in the workshop.

-OK.

-I think it's fair to day we got fairly medieval.

-On this lot!

I'm guessing to the untrained eye, you didn't get anything from that.

-No, no, no.

-You told me you were the best!

That's destroyed.

There's nothing left of the media platters,

so we can't recover any data.

'I'll try not to look too smug!

'Anyway, 1-0 to Bang.'

So, this one, this is the one I had the most fun with.

This is the golf shot.

And I've got to say, it was a perfect, perfect strike.

So, any joy?

No.

In the case of this laptop drive, the platter is made of glass.

Oh, look at that!

What you managed to do is shatter the platters.

If a disc is shattered, you're not getting the data back.

2-0! It's looking good.

But I wonder how he got on

with the drive Jem zapped with his mega-magnet.

That magnet WAS powerful enough

to get through the case of the hard drive

and wipe it sufficiently for the hard drive to stop working.

OK, 3-0 to me and Jem.

-Yes!

-3-0!

OK, so these two, which are similar ones that went in the toaster.

How did you get on?

Are these toast?

No.

-Ahh!

-OK!

So, hang on. You got a...

-God!

-Do you recognise these photos?

Sadly, I recognise those photos.

-OK, so there you go. You've clawed one back.

-OK.

How about the old tractor?

Again, we managed to get all the data back from that.

Oh, 3-2, and I thought Jem and I had this in the bag.

I'm sad about that!

'More awkward pictures of me are revealed

'and Rob is clawing his way back.'

Now, this one I can tell you, was Jem's favourite.

You didn't get anything off the sledgehammer one, did you?

-Yes, all of it.

-You're kidding?!

And the consequences of Jem's failure are there to see.

Actually, the one I'm really interested in is this one.

I mean, this is a solid-state drive

and anybody who's got a smartphone has one of these in their lives.

-This is actually from a USB-type memory stick.

-Mm-hm.

How did we get on with this?

We got on OK.

We managed to dry it out and got all the pictures off it again.

So, there you go - Rob has won,

and the last of my embarrassing pics are displayed for all to see.

So, smashing up your computer isn't guaranteed to wipe your hard drive.

And what's more, it's a waste of resources.

If you want to recycle your computer,

the best option is to use scrambling software.

It's free on the internet,

but you have to watch out for fake versions

that can actually steal your data.

Check our website for recommended downloads.

-So, there's the socially responsible way of doing it.

-Mm-hm.

Or there's the Bang way.

Which, I have to say, was very satisfying.

Yes, it would be!

-Happy Christmas, Liz!

-Seriously!

-This is for you.

-I hope you're proud of yourself!

-It's kind of nice.

-It's like an art installation.

-It's kind of pretty.

-"Jem was here".

Probably a better idea to use the right kind of software

to get rid of the data on your computer, so then you can recycle it,

someone else can use the computer.

You're right. This is more fun.

Another thing - be careful when you chuck out your old mobile phone

because obviously there's loads of personal information,

personal data on them.

Exactly. So, make sure you give them to a reputable organisation.

-This is it for this show, but we will see you soon.

-Look forward to it.

-Bye-bye.

-Bye.

Next time, Johnny Ball will be using maths to work out

how many cabs are in London.

Whether we'll get this right, I can't be sure.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd