On Tue, Jul 18, 2000 at 11:32:21AM -0400, Trei, Peter wrote: > The only factors which rein in this exploitation are speed and cost. A > determined, well-funded investigator could remount the platters > and attempt to read them using special tools, such as STM probes. > However, I'd be really curious to know just how fast (and how costly) > it would be to use such tools to reconstruct, say, 5MB of compressed > data, stored in sectors scattered over a 30 GB disk, after even just 10 > overwrites. To me it sounds like *serious* headache time. I recently read a short report on how the German police and the BSI restored files that had been illegally deleted by the Kohl government after they lost the elections. Four methods were used to recover the data: * reading backup tapes that were found "by chance" * undoing the DOS delete command * moving files out of the Windows trash can :-) * one department uhad sed special software that erases data by overwriting the disk seven times, but they aborted it after two or three runs, and the BSI was able to restore the data.
