Re: Program to wipe data from disk free space

From: Keith Oxenrider <koxenrider(at)sol-biotech.com>
Date: Mon Aug 11 2003 - 06:32:27 EDT

Obviously I failed to adequately explain the purpose in my post. It was triggered by the article "Hard drives offer up secrets" as posted in the message "RE: Windows HD image for forensics testing" by madmex. I am aware of the residue of information left on a hard drive that has been overwritten; though I believe that most techniques to recover that data require opening the hard drive case and special equipment. I also believe that in order to overwrite data to the standards you and others have mentioned require special drivers that are probably OS/hard drive specific. Since it is (to the security aware community) well know that formatting a drive is a waste of time I felt that offering something that could be run on most any architecture (probably even DOS) by people with little or no knowledge programming (though obviously they would need a compiler) would be something useful. If I had a hard drive that stored something sensitive (like that in an ATM) I would physically destroy it. The salvage value of the drive is miniscule in comparison to the potential value of the information. But if I have a drive that is from my personal home machine that is being donated to a school I feel this is quite adequate for my protection.

At 03:03 PM 8/10/2003 -0600, Kurt Seifried wrote:
>Like most first attempt wiping programs this one fails miserably. It fails

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This list is provided by the SecurityFocus ARIS analyzer service. For more information on this free incident handling, management and tracking system please see: http://aris.securityfocus.com Received on Mon Aug 11 15:55:30 2003