[olug] [OT] IBM Authorized service center in Lincoln...

[Christopher Cashell]

On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 8:05 PM, Irish <irish.masms at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why settle for 'just fine'?
> *Darik's Boot And Nuke* | Hard Drive Disk Wipe and Data
> Clearing<http://www.dban.org/>

One of the options offered by DBAN is identical to using dd to
overwrite a disk with zeros.  There's been random speculation that
high end data recovery equipment could recover data from a zeroed out
hard drive, but I've never seen any evidence of anyone being able to
actually do so (on a modern drive).  Additionally, the rapid pace of
technology increase in modern disks works heavily against low-level
recover of data from a zeroed disk.

I know of no data recovery specialist/company that claims to be able
to recover data from a modern hard drive that's been overwritten with
zeros.  Supposedly government security agencies (NSA) are able to do
so.  I'm not going to say it's impossible that they can, but I would
put it at fairly improbable, and not a valid concern unless you're a
foreign spy.

You can spend hours overwriting a disk 7 times with random data, but
you're really not adding any security over a single overwriting with
zeros. ;-)

> --
> Timothy G. O'Brien, CISSP, GSEC, NSA-IAM

-- 
Christopher