Some "Tech" Reporters make me angry

Not sure if I posted in the right section. Sorry if I did. I just watched a CNN tech report clip where they had an "expert" talking about how to safely remove your personal data from a hard drive. He said you can wipe the data by using a Windows or Mac to format the drive. Mind you, he said format, as in the built-in formatting tools, not a low-level format or a utility like Active Kill Disk. What a load of misinformation. If he was a real expert he would know that a simple format does not effectively wipe the data and it can still be recovered using the right tools. This is just a small example of how journalism sucks. The have guys masquerading as experts giving erroneous info to people. Some of these guys think that just because they have an iphone, they're automatically tech experts. Geez, reminds me of some of the ridiculous statements I hear from salesmen at Best Buy.

 

Oh trust me you get them everywhere. Spoke to Dell dealer and I asked a simple question about the r2 I believed till he said. All models of alienware laptops have aluminum.... Trust me the only ppl who are watching those ppl on tv are mothers....(my mum goes oh look he must be right)

 

Windows 7 and Vista indeed does overwrite the HDD during formatting, unless you opt for "quick format".

Source: Microsoft, Windows 7 FAQ and Microsoft, Windows Vista FAQ

See also: Secure deletion: a single overwrite will do it - The H: Security news and Open source developments

Michael

 

So why are you mad? Because you know more than the reporter? Even when you actually learn something true from someone, there is always more to it HE/SHE doesn't know and other people who know more. Or was it the first time you hear something about a subject you know more about?

Besides that, michael_recycled is right How secure this is, is a totally different subject - nothing is 100% secure!

Don't worry... be happy... go for a walk

 

ok guys, a full format will overwrite the data but that doesn't mean data recovery tools can't recover some of the files. We're talking about completely wiping out a drive so there's no possibility of recovery and a full format just doesn't cut it. Now if you mentioned the cipher.exe utility that encrypts data then overwrites it then ok, but not a regular format. Plus the Windows 7 format utility may not be entirely accurate in covering all sectors of the disk (read the comments after the 2nd article Michael posted). To properly wipe a drive, a dedicated utility designed for that task should be used so all the blocks of the disk are addressed and overwritten, even several times over for extra security. I'd say that is 100% secure.

I had a customer format his hard drive (full format) a year ago. We sent out the drive to a recovery place in the UK and most, not all, of his data was recovered. He was using Vista at the time.

EDIT: Gracy, I would have snapped back at you but if that avatar is really you, I can't. You're too cute

 

you are a mean lady

 

It's like that everywhere, not just tech. I've seen "specialists" on TV programs about various domains(ex: biologists, industrialists, psychologists) who according to some of my teachers in the same field were saying lots of crap. I remember this "weather expert" who was telling us to brace ourselves because the events of "the day after tomorrow" would happen soon after the movie came out

Btw easiest way of removing the data is to make sure the HDD isn't readable anymore Nitroglycerine works well.

 

Nope! the only tools that guarantee 100% security are a hammer and electrical drill machine. Electrical saw would do too.

No software guarantees 100% data loss - give it to a data recovery lab and surprise yourself

 

LOL...you're still cute

Computer Forensics Investigations: Body of Evidence - CSO Online - Security and Risk

How to Completely Erase a Hard Disk Drive - Webopedia.com

 

May 01, 2004 Quite a few things changed in the past 7 years....

 

Gracy I don't see your point here. You mentioned physically destroying a disk is 100% secure. Did you read the article? The guy used scissors to destroy the disk, and they were able to tape it back together and recover incriminating evidence without which there could not have been a conviction. Granted, it was a floppy disk, but the same can be implemented to some degree on a hard disk as well. Yet you still are under the impression that completely wiping the data with the right utilities is not as secure as a hammer or drill?

 

Yes! As if I were to destroy it I certainly wouldn't just cut it into pieces

No software can destroy data the way other stuff can

 

Really, I don't think I said anything wrong, or yalcin for that matter. She did tell me to "go for a walk" in her first post. Since when is complimenting someone out of line, or is it perhaps politically incorrect to call someone cute. We're having a discourse here, not an argument.

EDIT: I see where you're coming from Pirx, and it's never my intention to be out of line or offend anyone so I'll respect your comment and just stop any further comments. I never thought I'd have to apologize for complimenting a pretty girl, but I can see that it has no place here. So sorry if I offended anyone.

 

Lads, and ladies. Do stay on topic, if you want to talk about something else there is always the private messaging option. Thank you.

Johnny T
NBR Moderation Team

 

Thanks Pirx and Johnny, didn't mean for things to get carried away. PM'd Gracy and sorted things out, so all is cool. Will keep it on topic in the future.

 

lol, check this quote:

"Crime Scene Investigation are able to reconstruct a crime, describe how it was perpetrated, and finger the person who did the deed"

... do you see what they do to the person who did the deed .... LOL

but yes, software erase is in no way 100% secure, given the time and technology needed.

besides, shredder was a stupid thing to use for that case though. I'd rather burn the disk itself

but to the original post - there will always be experts on higher level than the experts that you consider as such today. No need to be pissed, just know what you should expect when watching TV

P.S.
what's up with all comments on Gracy123, lol. Shortage on girlfriends is what I suspect. And since you seem to believe persons identity over the internet then I must say that I'm not from this planet.

 

Just run Darik's Boot and Nuke or hook it up to a Mac and with Disk Utility run the 7 pass wipe. After that really only the NSA or data recovery specialists spending lots of time/effort can recover data, simple as that.

 

Open up your hard drive, put the platters through a paper shredder, then in the microwave, and finally burn whatever's left. I'd like to see them pull my kiddie off of that!

Why not use a blender as well, or perhaps a slap-chop?

 

I knew this would eventually lead back to the magic bullet...

It makes smoothies too!

----
ON TOPIC

Yes reporters tend to not have their facts straight, watch any FOX news lately?

 

This.

I'd go so far as to even say that a simple (single?) pass of writing zeros to the drive will render data unreadable to anyone but the notional super-advanced, super-budgeted intelligence agencies. And, maybe not even then.

I remember this challenge. Yeah, it's about three years old. Yet I don't think anyone took up the offer.

Hell, I think a mod--Flipfire or Pita--challenged anyone in NBR to recover files from a zeroed drive as long as the challenger paid to and from shipping. From what I hear, no takers, either.

EDIT: It was Pita. And he would give all his money.

 

That's an excellent summary. Recovery from a low-level format is theoretically possible, but in practice, even if anyone is able to do it, they're unlikely to advertise this fact or spend their time on anything mundane. The amount of money and effort this takes means that it is reserved for cases known to be extraordinary.

 

So back on topic P): what tech news sources/journalists do you trust? I like Ars Technica and Slashdot commentators (NOT the editors!).

 

Paper shredder? Have you ever seen the platters that spin in your drive? You'd destroy your shredder in no time flat. Nowadays most platters are made out of a certain type of glass, which is extremely tough. I once destroyed a drive by hitting it with a hammer after having it open. My first attempt did nothing to the platters, and I had to hit it HARD to break those things.

Yes, a simple full format is entirely sufficient, unless the data on your drive is worth upwards of millions of dollars...

 

Out of pure curiosity, I wonder if that disk would have been readable, assuming you could reassemble it in a dust-free environment and all that.

So no it's no longer "how many passes of zeros does it take to erase my data," it's "how many hammer-whacks does it take to erase my data."

And, if you're handling data that sensitive, shame on you for letting it get taken so easily, haha.

That stuff should be stored in thos fictional drives that dissolve in water.

 

I respectfully disagree Unfortunately I have been in a situation where my drive was being recovered in order to collect evidences... Good thing is - documents and photos that were accidentally deleted about 2 years ago and I was not able to recover, were successfully recovered, although they have been overwritten numerous times Took about 10 hours to scan a 500 GB HDD.

Don't think you are smarter then the people who have spent years developing tools and methods for data recovery.

I learned my lesson. If you think you are save just by formatting your drive - good luck

 

My guess is that quite a bit of the data would have been rocoverable, by experts. Having those data recovered after me "changing my mind" would cost me a couple of grand, though. Lesson: You better know what you are doing once you swing that hammer.

On the other hand, once that platter has exploded into a thousand pieces, nobody will get any data off of the debris. Gracy is right about that.

Yes, I was going to say, in that case you know who you are, and you should have a professional data security plan in place that starts with hardware-encrypted drives.

Oopsie...

That is entirely impossible. I do understand the physics of hard drives, and there is simply no way to recover data from sectors that have been re-written "multiple times". It is possible, sometimes, to partially recover data that have been overwritten once, but even that cannot be done using standard equipment and software only. You need to disassemble the drive in a clean room, mount the platters in specialized readers, and spend a lot of time and effort. Even though I know nothing about you, I severely doubt that anybody made that kind of effort to get at your data. My guess is they plugged your drive into one of their systems, and ran some very good recovery software. It just so happened that your files, in fact, had not been overwritten.

I don't need to be smarter than them, I only need to understand how hard drives work, and I know quite a bit about that.

 

I think you guys are arguing things in different context.

1. there are those who just don't want their private information being recovered by casual people or slightly sophisticated people who 'may' recover say credit card information etc. For this purpose, a full format is in general enough as anything that can recover information beyond this point becomes expensive and the gain(from the recovered information) doesn't cover the cost.

2. then there are people like gracy123 who is dealing with completely different people like law enforcement etc.(note I am only saying that as an example). For them, simple full format is no longer enough, for this a few rounds of random overwritten followed by physical damage is warranted.

3. then there are those that may be dealing with the 3 letter agencies. For these, even physical damage may not be enough and the data should be stored in an encrypted(proper) form from the very beginning then a few rounds of random overwritten followed by physical damage such that recovering partial content would be useless(unlike case 2 above).

However, we are mostly talking about people in category 1 as for 2 and 3, they should not be taking advice on some forum like here(and I though they would take advice from here seriously, if they ever present here).

 

Very well categorized!! Congratulations!

You are absolutely right in general, the only thing I don't entirely agree with is number 1. - People who are doing this so to say on daily basis and didn't just find a HDD on the street and thought "Ow, what a good opportunity to test that new data recovery program I downloaded but never tried out", are capable of easily going beyond simple one-round formatting, without any additional costs or special technologies. Just try a few of the programs offered out there and you will be surprised to see what they find on your HDD!

 

I think you quoted the wrong person, but in any case, what you are talking about is rather different. When you "delete" a file, that does not actually do anything to the sectors on the hard drive, it just tells the operating system that it should ignore the data in these sectors from now on and overwrite them if necessary (there's no guarantee that they'll be overwritten though). This is what the data recovery agencies usually deal with and they're pretty good at getting them back.

What we're talking about are writing zeros to the entire hard drive. That is, hook it up to a Unix system and do something like:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/YourDrive

This will overwrite all sectors with 0s and there will no longer be anything you can do to recover the data on the drive through software because the hardware bits have been reset. It is theoretically possible to recover it by disassembling the drive and reading the difference between fields that were set to zero from zero and fields that were set to zero from one, but this is a very difficult thing to do. If you overwrite it multiple times with random patterns, even that is no longer possible (or at least much more difficult).

 

are you talking about quick format(which only update a small tiny percentage of metadata being stored on the drive) vs full format which actually writes over each sector(that is a very long process for a say 500GB disk).

 

In my case I just truecrypt the drive, then zero, no damage needed and the drive is transferable.

 

encryption from the beginning is the step paranoid one should opt for. That however means cutting your storage system's performance by 30-40% at the least. May be newer version of bitlocker/truecrypt will use the AES instructions in the i series processor to compensate for that.

oh, don't use SF SSD if you do this as it would negate any performance advantage it has over other brands.

 

Nope. No performance loss Most i-CPUs support Hardware Acceleration for AES The HDD is just as fast as when not encrypted or the difference is negligible. You've seen my HDD benchmarking... have you noticed anything different? ))

 

good to hear. though just having an encrypted system still have the weakest link which is the owner who knows the password, if we are talking about category 2 and 3. For people dealing with law enforcement, there is the court order situation that one needs to deal with. And for the 3 letters agency, things like water boarding can be performed as well.

a form of deniable encrypted file system is needed which TrueCrypt has some support last I heard.

 

As I said... I've been in a situation... not gonna say more but trust me - encryption is the way to go.

Teenager jailed for keeping computer password secret | UK news | The Guardian

This can happen in UK and the middle east only (normal countries have self-incrimination laws which give you the right NOT to reveal or share any information that can lead to self-incrimination...), but speaks enough about data recovery and government institutions...

The encrypted package can be recovered even if deleted... but then?

 

Having been doing that for over a decade on anything that I think is remotely valuable to me.

But I doubt court order or water boarding only happens in UK and middle east.

 

"Normal" countries have self-incrimination laws which give you the right NOT to reveal or share any information that can lead to self-incrimination...

And I do forget stuff you know... I don't remember my best friends birthday-dates, how am I supposed to remember a 50 characters password..........

 

I am not a lawyer practicing criminal law but as a layman, I can't see the difference between a search warrant and a court order for the password. They are both a way to enter your 'premise'.

As for arguing 'not remembering', that would be up to the judge as if you cannot convince them, that is a contempt and can mean jail time.

 

Nope. No proof - no crime! One remains innocent until the opposite has been proven!
A law to contradict this is only available in UK... and of course in all countries where there are no human rights anyway.

Search warrant for your home corresponds to search warrant for your computer - they are entitled to search and collect everything they consider an evidence - this would be your HDD. Whether they will find what they are looking for and will be able to extract it is their own problem and nothing can (legally) make you help them with that! Right to silence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I am not a lawyer myself, but was put in a situation where I had to take advantage of the right to silence

But don't think of me bad I'm not a criminal - was just not happy with their process. They didn't ask politely enough

 

As I said, I am not a lawyer so can't argue whether you are right or wrong. Luckily, my precaution is only for potential business disputes so don't need to deal with these organizations

edit:

just found a few that is not in UK

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10172866-38.html

http://www.out-law.com/page-9514

 

so was mine... but obviously you never know.