Mr. Daniele and I have disagreed on the finer points of this topic in the past. HOWEVER, John is right on target and his advice here should be listened to carefully. I have seen a few posts recommending products that don't even pass muster with DOD standards. If one is looking for a software disk-wipe product, it is truly not necessary to spend the big dollars when the one most csi people I have talked with about this seem almost unanimous that the best product for available for this purpose is FREE. It is called "Eraser" from Sami Tolvanen, a young man (mid twenties I believe) still in school at the Tampere University of Technology in Finland. He is nothing short of brilliant. A couple of ISSA conferences back there was some discussion on this topic and this was the overwhelming utility of choice. The program is most used in Windows for secure deletion and free-space wipes, but the DOS utility that comes with the download for secure disk erasure is nothing short of excellent. http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/ But again, it should be followed up with exactly what John mentioned in his post. I have included it with mine below.
Mike Donovan >===== Original Message From John Daniele <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ===== >This topic had been discussed at great length in a previous thread - >unclassified disk sanitizers; to sum it up, no a simple format will not >ensure that data cannot be recovered. What is needed is a tool that will >overwrite every physical sector of a drive with data, from the very start >to the very, very end. 'dd' will do the job just fine. However, with any >tool that you use, be careful of BIOS translation errors and verify that >the last sector of the drive had been wiped using a disk editor, >preferably with a verification system seperate from the one used to do the >wipe. > >However, since the original person who asked the question works for >government, depending on the classification of the data he wishes to >destroy, this may or may not be adequate enough. Drives that house data >classified as Top Secret are generally destroyed in house. > > >_________________________________________ >John Daniele >Technical Security & Intelligence >Toronto, ON >Voice: (416) 605-2041 >E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Web: http://www.tsintel.com
