On Tue, 16 Feb 1999 15:59:39 -0800 "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> A fellow was recently convicted of owning and distributing child
> pornography on the internet. The photos he was charged over had been
> erased from his hard drive over two to three years ago, according to the
> article, and the RCMP (police) had used "sophisticated techniques" to
> retrieve the images from his hard drive.
> Huh? So, does that mean if someone mail bombed me with illegal images
> they'd be there long after I erased them and scandisked and defragged and
> rewrote over them and possibly reformatted? Anybody know to what degree
> can they take this data recovery? The article did not elaborate further,
> can you?
Those "sophisticated techniques" may have been as simple as using
one of the many "undelete" commands; Windoze dummies often assume
that deleting a file is permanent. ( It isn't permanent unless that
sector has been overwritten with other things; even then, the real
"sophisticated techniques" can indeed restore old data, even if
written over a few times.)
That's why the limited amount of classified data permitted on some
military PCs must be "wiped", in addition to deleted; these programs
repeatedly overwrite the sectors used by the now-deleted file with
"marching" patterns of 00-ffhex to frustrate data-restoring spies.
Most of them overwrite the entire file area at least 256 times...
BTW - "wipefile" programs do a much better job of "destroying evidence"
than even a low-level format, which can leave perceptible traces of
the original data intact, even if they aren't readable by normal means.
Even the old PCTOOLS software could "revitalize" a beat-up, unreadable
floppy.
- John T.
-- Arachne V1.48;beta 2, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://home.arachne.cz/
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