Re: Program to wipe data from disk free space

[Keith Oxenrider <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]

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
> to wipe slack space (i.e. 16k data allocations, a 10k file leaves 6k unused,
> a previous file may have used it). It fails to wipe MFT space (small files
> may be stored directly in the MFT). This would leave a TON of evidence. My
> advice: Buy wiping software that actually works. I did some testing, the
> commercial ones don't even fare to well, none of the amateur ones came even
> close to being truly effective.
>
>
> Kurt Seifried, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> A15B BEE5 B391 B9AD B0EF
> AEB0 AD63 0B4E AD56 E574
> http://seifried.org/security/
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Saturday, August 09, 2003 9:32 AM
> Subject: Program to wipe data from disk free space
>
>
> >
> >
> > To indulge my paranoia I wrote a little ANSI C program to write random
> > data to a drive.  I wrote it targeted toward Windows, but it should work
> > with minimal editing on any machine with an ANSI C compiler.  It can be
> > found at http://www.sol-biotech.com/code/wipeIt/wipeIt.c and I placed it
> > in the public domain.
> >
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