The material Gary's quote includes a correct part - not writing unencrypted stuff to disks - and an indication that his source is dangerously unreliable and not to be trusted - "KOH". KOH is somebody's idea of a helpful virus that spreads itself whether you need it or not, though its claimed intention is to distribute security software. Gary's own comments at the end about Securedrive, etc., are useful, though there are newer programs such as PGPdisk, scramdisk, and Safehouse that are worth checking out. Floppy drives got mentioned - if you pop the cover off, you can easily access the magnetic material. Shredders are your friend. I could suggest burning the shreds if you're paranoid, but I'd have to include a California Prop 65 Toxics warning :-) Wipe programs and controller-based disk caches got mentioned - usually the cache is about a MB, so you need to write a lot more than that to prevent the cache from absorbing multiple reads in a row. They're also not very good at wiping bad sectors that have been mapped out by disk controllers. I tend to agree with Dave Emery that the usual recovery job is disks that have been messed up and stopped working rather than disks that have been massively overwritten. I don't know what was wrong with the one hard drive I had recovered (other than having a Microsoft OS and being hauled around in a laptop), but the company could recover most of the files on it. At 01:10 PM 04/05/2000 CDT, Gary Jeffers wrote: > On the matter of getting rid of dangerous info on your hard disk, >here is a very interesting quote from The GIANT BLACK BOOK of >COMPUTER VIRUSES, second edition by Dr. Mark Ludwig >see http://www.logoplex.com/resources/ameagle ... > > The best defense against this kind of attack is to see to it that > >one NEVER writes an unencrypted disk. If all the spy can pick up off the > >disk using such techniques is encrypted data, it will do him little good. > >The auto-encryption feature of KOH can help make this NEVER a reality. .... Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
