Posted on 11/03/2005 4:43:16 PM PST by neverdem
Maintaining privacy in the era of digital information requires work on a number of fronts, whether fending off spyware, protecting important files with encryption or configuring a Wi-Fi hot spot to keep interlopers off a wireless network.
One basic privacy measure, however, is easily overlooked: proper data destruction.
Deleting confidential data completely is essential when donating or selling old computers, and it can also help maintain privacy on computers that may end up lost or stolen. And for businesses looking for ways to comply with the security requirements of laws like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a sound policy on data control and destruction is crucial.
When normal deletion methods like the Recycle Bin or the delete command are used, the computer's operating system, for the sake of speed, creates an illusion that data has been deleted. In fact, it merely earmarks that region of a disk or drive as being available for new data to overwrite the old data. Until that overwriting occurs, the old data can be retrieved with undelete programs and tools used by data recovery labs and law enforcement agencies.
There are, however, several options for securely eliminating data from hard disks, U.S.B. flash drives and other storage media. These programs overwrite data with meaningless characters to render it unrecoverable with today's data recovery techniques. Some of the programs can overwrite entire drives...
--snip--
For example, Darik's Boot and Nuke, known also as DBAN, is a free open-source program available at dban.sourceforge.net. It runs on Windows computers and offers six methods to overwrite data, including a Defense Department standard (DoD 5220.22-M) that can overwrite the disk three times, as well as a method called PRNG Stream Wipe, which can make a user-defined number of disk overwrites using randomly generated characters.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I still have my copy of Z-Tree, which was a Windows version.
Man, there are some things (like going through thousands of email logs) that it's the perfect utility for! Checkout www.ztree.com
Mark
Actually, this doesn't help at all. I can physically remove the platters, and send them off for data recovery. You need to completely destroy the platters, i.e. shred them!
Mark
bump
might do the job.
Got any geeks out there?
Only on certain WD hard drive controllers. Then again, there's G=CC00:5 for others (IIRC, the WD-1006V series), and IIRC DTC controllers used an address of DC00:6.
Quick! What were the drive specs of a Seagate ST-251-1 (that was the fast drive: 40ms access!) 40MB drive? 820 x 6 x 17!
Do I qualify?
Mark
I use "Eraser" for ordinary data destruction needs. It's 27-pass over-write with random data is probably good enough for most purposes.
But for company machines (laptops or desktops) that we dispose... we just don't take any chances. All hard drives are removed, and tossed in a box. Every now and then we bring in a commercial shredder truck (one that can handle metal objects) and toss the drives in.
All gone. :-)
I downloaded "Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN)" to my computer as directed. When I tried to save it on a 3.5" floppy, I had an error message that the capacity on a new, formatted IMATION 2HD 1.44 MB was insufficient to save DBAN on that floppy.
I have a Dell Dimension L733r that's over 5 years old. It has at least CD-ROM capability that includes audio but not video playback applications. Can you suggest any DOS commands that I could use to save it on a floppy, or in the alternative, to activate the program with a DOS command to clean the hard drive's memory when the time comes to upgrade?
Well, when I sold my old 350mhz E-machine for $50 to a 75 year old man that uses dialup to do his "covert" work, I simply reformated and reinstalled OS. Gotta live dangerously, have a little risk in life.
A friend of mine (UPS driver) was given a PC by a well off customer. They didn't even bother to delete the data files. He tells me that he wished they had. The man had a bunch of nude pics of his wife on the HD and he said it was *not* a pretty sight.
IMO, the easiest way to to it is pull the HD and temporarily slave it to another PC's primary drive. Then you can transfer anything or do whatever you want. It is very easy to do. You probably know someone that can do it for you.
I use Window Washer and have noticed that the computer ran faster after using that utility. I'm not concerned about security, just performance. If I change my hard drive I'll just put the old one in my ML243/82-2 Nuclear Blast Furnace.
BTWay, the folks at Webroot (who make the Washer) are nice and 'merican.......even though they're in the liberal Mecca: Boulder Colorado.
To this day, people look at me funny when I tell them how useful debug can be! For instance, doing a quick wipe of the partition table, boot sector, and MBR with a little script (it writes 200 bytes of zeros to the drive). I call it "whackit." This is in no way secure (it's the equivalent of tearing the table of contents out of a book, without touching any other pages), it can be useful for doing a fresh install of an OS on a hard drive. The drive appears brand spanking new to the OS installation, and will get a new signature.
F 200 L200 0
A 100
MOV AX,301
MOV BX,200
MOV CX,1
MOV DX,0080
INT 13
INT 3
G=100
Norton Commander rocks; XTree sucks rocks.
I still have a shareware version of Commander that works for long file names under all current versions of Windows. XTree DOS, like Commander DOS, was a dual pane file manager that would copy stuff back and forth and assume directory shown in the other pane was the target. It was hilarious when XTree released their Windows version, which was basically two Explorer windows side-by-side that were completely unaware of each other. DOH!
Bookmarking for future stealth operations. Thanks
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