On Fri, Oct 01, 2010 at 12:11:19PM -0500, Dean.Benjamin at mm.com wrote: > I had believed that a hard drive could be securely erased by multiple > over-writes with random bit patterns, such that not even the NSA could > salvage anything useful. > > Chuck, when you said "Not so", you made me sit up in surprise. I am > genuinely curious. Could you refer us to technical articles that > explain how experts can retrieve data from drives that have been > subjected to rigorous shredding (eg, with utilities such as DBAN > http://www.dban.org/)? (If indeed that is your claim.) I don't know what Chuck knows and what he can tell, but I do know that some parts of the US government used to take all the hard drives out from computers before selling them for reuse or scrap. I presume the hard drives were shredded in large batches or hammered-in in small batches. Cheers, florin -- Bruce Schneier expects the Spanish Inquisition. http://geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts/fact/163 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20101001/60a0c8e7/attachment.pgp