RE: Interesting One

["Shayla Anthony" <santhony () telerama com>]

I know of a few programs that you can set to delete files up to 30 times in
a row. I was allways wondering why they were able to go so high, and allways
assumed the only information that can't be retrieved is from a hard drive
with bullet holes (just in case* (the FBI and other police forces send hard
drives back to HDD manufacturers with bullet holes to make sure that data
cant be retrieved - at least one of the police departments I am familiar
with did and said others did as well...)

Shayla

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Adams [mailto:dadams () johncrowley co uk]
Sent: Monday, October 28, 2002 5:06 PM
To: security-basics () security-focus com
Subject: Interesting One


Greetings Folks,

I had an interesting conversation today with someone from FAST
(Federation
Against Software Theft) They pretend not to be a snitch wing of the BSA.
Anyway, to get to the point, the guy that came to see me said that their
forensics guys could read data off a hard drive that had been written
over
up to thirty times. I find this very hard to believe and told him I
thought
he was mistaken but the guy was adamant that it could be done. My
question
is, does anyone have any views on this, or, can anyone point me to a
source
of information where I can get the facts on exactly how much data can be
retrieved off a hard drive and under what conditions etc etc.

Thanks

Dave Adams



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