Bugtraq mailing list archives
Re: RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory?
From: Ron van Daal <ronvdaal () n1x nl>
Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2005 22:47:13 +0200 (CEST)
We were not allowed to do a seven pass government wipe to dispose of the drives as our security people deemed it inadequate, we turned them over to our classified waste people who stored them until there were enough to justify having the platters removed and mechanicaly beaten into little lumps of metal.
Aren't you being too paranoid? I think a simple zeroing out of your entire drive using dd(1) starting with the first sector is enough to cover your privacy. I don't know about other ""secret"" government agencies in NL or other counties who actually do microscopic magnetic recovery efforts, but dd(1) does the trick to defeat disk analysis by our national digital crime unit. From what I've read in one of their internal memo's is that they just use a hexdump(1) alike utility to find any non-zero bytes on the drive to conclude "the drive has been wiped entirely".
As far as I know will our National Forensics Institute not go any further. To be more precise: most disks analyses are being done automaticly rather than by hand (which is even more the case with the digital crime unit). For this they use registry-catalogs, browser cache/cookie/history inventory programs, raw disk searching on strings, and the like. Which is prettylogical as disk sizes are rapidly increasing, making the analysers' job pretty difficult because of the ever increasing haystack. While data hiding
techniques continue to develop - making the needle even harder to find. Grt, Ron van Daal
Current thread:
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory?, (continued)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Jake Appelbaum (Jul 27)
- RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Jared Johnson (Jul 22)
- RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? D. Weiss (Jul 22)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Dana Hudes (Jul 22)
- Re: [BugTraq] Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Robin Whittle (Jul 22)
- Re: [BugTraq] Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Volker Kuhlmann (Jul 27)
- RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? dave kleiman (Jul 27)
- RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Jeremy Epstein (Jul 21)
- RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Glenn.Everhart (Jul 21)
- Re: RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? underwood-de (Jul 22)
- Re: RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Ron van Daal (Jul 27)
- Re: RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Simple Nomad (Jul 28)
- Re: RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Ron van Daal (Jul 27)
- RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Earnhart, Benjamin J (Jul 22)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Casper . Dik (Jul 27)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? devnull (Jul 27)
- RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Robert Thompson Jr. (Jul 22)
- Re: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Andreas Beck (Jul 27)
- RE: Peter Gutmann data deletion theaory? Bret Morey (Jul 27)