>I am looking to draft a corporate policy requiring all hard drives to be wiped before >being decommissioned, sold, donated, etc. I looked into this area some time ago for a similar reason and at the time several utilities such as Norton Utils included a diskwipe utility which would wipe to what was at the time the US DoD standard (for unclassified material). This consisted of a number of "wipes", the first of which "inverted" the disk (writing over ones with zeros and vice versa), followed by an all ones and then an all zeros sweep etc. Each sweep iteration increases the difficulty in recovery of latent information, to the point where the data is effectively unrecoverable without the help of a tunneling microscope or whatever. If the aim is that a hard disk should be reusable, degaussing can often render the disk unusable as the read/write heads get messed up, however, for zip disks or other media without integrated r/w heads, I presume they can be reused after this. As to the destruction of media- there are a number of labs which now provide "splicing" services where data can be recovered from disk fragments, so even media to be destroyed should be erased first. BTW, there's a gotcha in this area in terms of policy.. most computer maintenance companies take away replaced hard disks in the case of irreparable damage. Many companies provide for this in their maintenance agreements with vendors by stipulating on-site destruction of replaced media, and any policy should state provision in this area. Regards, John ******************************************************************** John Curran Ph: +353-(0)1-6099905 Systems Architecture and Technology Group (SATG) Fax: +353-(0)1-6766500 Cognotec Limited, GSM: +353-(0)86-6050193 2-4 Ely Place, Dublin 2. Ireland. john.curranat_private *********************************** -----Original Message----- From: Darren Welch [mailto:WELCHDat_private] Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 4:45 PM To: forensicsat_private Subject: wipe utilities I am looking to draft a corporate policy requiring all hard drives to be wiped before being decommissioned, sold, donated, etc. The wipe utility must be able to make numerous (up to seven) uninterrupted passes and support a wide array of file systems (fat, ntfs, etc). Also, the software must support the ability to assign a particular hex character as the wipe character. Could anyone recommend some products? I currently use wiper for my forensic investigations and am very happy with that but I want to provide our IT group with several other acceptable options. Thanks, D ************************************************************************** This email, its contents and any files attached are intended only for the named addressee. They contain information which may be confidential and/or legally privileged. If you are not the named addressee or if you have received this email in error, (a) you may not, without the consent of Cognotec, copy (which includes forwarding), use or rely on any information or attachments in any way and (b) please notify the sender by return email and delete it from your email system. Unless separately agreed, Cognotec does not accept any responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this email or its attachments or for any statements or contractual commitments contained in this email or its attachments. ************************************************************************** ----------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided by the SecurityFocus ARIS analyzer service. For more information on this free incident handling, management and tracking system please see: http://aris.securityfocus.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Jun 28 2001 - 16:56:10 PDT