I had an idea today about how to make servers self destruct in case of some type of security breach. I guess this might be influenced by the Star Trek movie I saw the other night. They seem to blow up more Enterprises in the recent stories.
My idea is to keep a blank CD-R in the drive of the server at all times. On hard disk there is an ISO file that is written to the CD-R on demand and then the server is rebooted. The server will ignore the blank CD-R during reboots until it is written with a valid image. The contents of the ISO needs to be a boot loader and kernel, like Grub and Linux plus a file system with a wipe program. The wipe program is started once the kernel is booted and it iterates through the collection of hard drives, which the kernel found during the boot process, and writes over them with a pattern.
This kind of the self destruct sequence can be automated with a script and invoked through a terminal on the local network or through a VPN. It could also be loaded into cron and deactivated on a regular basis from going off.
So, if your servers are under heavy attack, and you have no other choice, start the count down. :-)