Government Standards File Deleter

Anyone know anything about these file deleters and whether or not they are the real thing or a load of crap? I have a client who is somewhat on the paranoid side, and wants one of these things and I said I would look into it for him.

As I have no prior experience with these utiilties, I thought I would ask the Antionline community.

I looked around on Google, and saw a ton of programs that securely delete yours file so there is no way they can be retrieved later, etc.

Does anyone have any recommendations on these types of software? Ton of them on google, but I do not know what is legit or not. Also do any of these support a recycle bin type approach, so you just drag the files onto an icon, and it will do its thing?

Thanks in advance.

Grinler

Yes, they work.

Instead of just erasing the pointer to the file, it will overwrite the file a specified number of times, making it harder to recover. It will even scramble and rename the file name several times before it deletes it too.

I use the freeware PGP which will not only securely delete your files, but encrypt them, encrypt whole partitions, etc. You can even wipe your freespace.

I really like it.

http://www.pgpi.org/download/

Thanks for the info. Which PGP product is it? Is it the actual PGP program that has these functions built into it now?

Hi Grinler,

I have worked in the defence industry for some time......we are more than "paranoid" about security...........saw two guys get 11 years each for trying to sell "secrets" :eek:

If you overwrite something once, it is to all intents and purposes irretrievable.

Overwrite it 3 times, and you really don't have a hope in hell.

DoD recommend overwrite three times with zeroes, and three times with ones, then a seventh time with random data...............try getting out of that one.

If you overwrite 32 times............I guess you think like me :D ...now that IS paranoid!

The two basic concepts are physical and electronic security. If you overwrite once, the data are not electronically recoverable in a meaningful form IMHO

The security flaw lies in two physical threats:

1. Magnetic remnance.........you can read down levels in the magnetic media
2. Track overlay.......the read write heads do not track perfectly...they leave a bit one side or the other.

You need an electron scanning/tunneling microscope and some pretty cool dudes to pull that sort of exploit?

Are any of my "little friends" after your "client" :D

Have fun...............PM me if you want the full two bob on this............hell I could write a ten page tutorial

Cheers

I've been using BCWipe. It will not only wipe it clean, but will look for any links in the system to the info. being cleaned. It was free.
Phishphreek80, you say the pgp will encrpt a whole partition? I'll have to look at that. Thanks.
Freddy

I am about to put together a little"paper" on this subject, which I will send to those who PM'd me.

I am not being "funny" it is too long to go into in the open forum, and I do not want to help those who would use the information for the wrong purposes.

I am prepared to trust all AO MEMBERS who ask me

We had to set up a process for dealing with old hard drives and systems being sent to auction. The state doesn't require the same level of security as the military, so we just use a freebie tool:

http://www.killdisk.com/

And this works just fine. It does a complete write, single pass, of the hard drive with 0's and 1's. Doesn't cost anything and satisfies the state requirements. The commercial versions go two, three or more times.

Better and more reliable than running a magnet across the drive.

I've done data recovery from older hard drives (way back in the MFM days). I know how hard it is and how long it takes, even on an old 20 or 40 megger. I also know what commercial data recovery services charge now for recovering a hard drive (had to get a quote not long ago).

Anything you can do to make the task of retrieving data from the media more difficult, will make the job virtually impossible. So, for us, there is no cost-benefit to going beyond the single-pass write of the drive.

Hope this helps.