Issue 08 Volume 8 August 2010 How to Completely Erase a Hard Disk Drive So…you've decided to donate your old computer to a charity, local group or school. Good for you! Now here are some tips to avoid data theft when donating a computer system. It's important to make sure your computer's hard drive is completely free of data. In the "no good deed ever goes unpunished" department, you need to ensure that you don't donate more than you planned. The last thing you want is to pass on a PC with sensitive business information, or even personal information such as stored passwords, personal documents and credit card numbers that could be retrieved. There are many ways to go about ensuring your data can never be retrieved. Obviously, you can choose to physically smash the drive, but there are alternatives that enable you to keep the system intact so you can donate a complete system. Erasing and Formatting: Just Not Secure Enough Simply erasing all the data on your hard drive and formatting it is not enough security. You can spend hours going through your hard drive and deleting all the files and documents you want, but using the delete key on your keyboard in Windows basically only removes the shortcuts to the files making them invisible to users. Deleted files still reside on the hard drive and a quick Google search will show many options for system recovery software which will allow anyone to reinstate that data. Formatting the hard drive is a bit more secure than simply erasing the files. Formatting a disk does not erase the data on the disk, only the address tables. It makes it much more difficult to recover the files. However a computer specialist would be able to recover most or all the data that was on the disk before the reformat. For some businesses and individual users, a disk format may be secure enough, depending, of course, on the type of data and information saved to the computer. It is not 100 percent safe, but if you have decided a disk format is a good choice, at the very least to do a full format rather than a quick format. Disk Wiping Options (aka Data Dump) Even more secure than reformatting is a process called disk wiping. The term disk wiping is not only used in reference to hard drives but any storage device such as CDs, RAIDs, thumb drives and others. Disk wiping is a secure method of ensuring that data, including company and individually licensed software on your computer and storage devices is irrecoverably deleted before recycling or donating the equipment. Because previously stored data can be brought back with the right software and applications, the disk wiping process will actually overwrite your entire hard drive with data, several times. Once you format, you'll find it all but impossible to retrieve the data which was on the drive before the overwrite. While disk wiping algorithms differ from product to product, they all will generally write the entire disk with a number (zero or one) then a reformat will be needed. The more times the disk is overwritten and formatted the more secure the disk wipe is, but the trade-off is the extra time to perform additional rewrites. Disk wipe applications will typically overwrite the master boot record, partition table, and every sector of the hard drive. There are a variety of products available for different operating systems that you can purchase or freely download online to perform more secure disk wipes. If time to perform the disk wipe is a consideration, there are also tech security companies who offer disk wipe services. Source: www.webopedia.com, August 28, 2009 Did You Know... In 2003 two MIT students purchased 158 used disk drives from various locations and found more than 5,000 credit card numbers, medical reports, detailed personal and corporate financial information, and several gigabytes worth of personal e-mail and pornography on those drives. Wiping or erasing applications Stories of Data Passed… To be sure that your data is removed beyond all practical ability to recover it, you should use a wiping or erasing utility. These tools overwrite every sector of the hard drive with binary 1's and 0's. Those that meet government security standards even overwrite each sector multiple times for added protection. April 1997 A woman in Pahrump, NV, purchases a used IBM PC and discovers records from 2000 patients who had prescriptions filled at Smitty’s Supermarkets pharmacy in Tempe, AZ. CyberScrub cyberCide 3.0 "Delete" or "Format" doesn't mean Erase Whether your data is sent to the recycle bin or your entire drive is formatted and repartitioned, the chance of unauthorized discovery is very real and poses issues of risk and liability. Securely wipe hard drives and overwrite, delete and destroy privileged data with cyberCide. cyberCide employs advanced hard drive erasure options that will defeat software OR hardware forensic recovery. cyberCide provides a cost effective solution for the critical task of data destruction and wiping files. White Canyon WipeDrive WipeDrive has been used to erase hard drive data on over 20 million hard drives! It is approved by the Department of Defense, and it is trusted by government agencies and major corporations. Think of a video tape that is full of recorded TV shows on it. The only way to get rid of the old shows is to tape over it. Using WipeDrive is like finding a channel completely full of static and then recording over the entire tape. Using WipeDrive before getting rid of your computer will completely erase hard drive data and protect yourself from identity theft. Kroll Ontrack Eraser Software Ontrack Eraser software is an easy-to-use, highly flexible data erasure tool that erases all traces of data stored on a targeted media ensuring that sensitive information does not fall into the wrong hands. The overwriting procedures used by Ontrack Eraser to permanently remove data meet the most stringent standards for data removal; including those of the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Industrial Security Program and CESG standards in the U.K. Are there topics that you would like to have covered in future newsletters? We are always looking for topics of interest. We welcome all suggestions! To submit a topic, subscribe, or unsubscribe to our distribution list, please email Shama Renée-McIntosh at [email protected]. 11301 N. US Highway 301 ♦ Suite 106 ♦ Thonotosassa, Florida 33592 PO Box 55 ♦ Thonotosassa, Florida ♦ 33592 (Remittance Address) (813) 246-4757 (TEL) ♦ (813) 246-4576 (FAX) WWW.AASYSGROUP.COM August 2001 More than 100 computers from Viant with confidential client data sold at auction by Dovebid. Spring 2002 Pennsylvania state Department of Labor and Industry sells computers with “thousands of files of information about state employees.” August 2002 Purdue student purchased used Macintosh computer at equipment exchange; computer contains FileMaker database with names and demographic information of 100 applicants to Entomology Department. ************** In an independent study, 10 used computers were purchased from a computer store. Below are the findings: Computer #1 - File server from a law firm which still had client documents on it. Computers #2-#5 – One was a server from a law firm, one had a database of mental health patients, one still had Quicken files on it, and one had a draft manuscript of a novelist. Source: Remembrance of Data Passed: Used Disk Drives and Computer Forensics, Simson L. Garfinkel ***AaSys will be closed on Monday, September 6th in observance of Labor Day.***