[PLUG] Disk Wipe on Linux

Paul Mullen pem at nellump.net
Wed Apr 20 18:51:27 UTC 2005


On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 11:34:46AM -0700, Richard C. Steffens wrote:
> Some years ago I bought a program from Symantec for wiping hard
> drives, with  options to do a simple erase, or a process whereby
> several patterns are written and erased over the whole disk.
> 
> What is the Linux equivalent of this?

Package: wipe
Description: Secure file deletion
 Recovery of supposedly erased data from magnetic media is easier than
 what many people would like to believe. A technique called Magnetic
 Force Microscopy (MFM) allows any moderately funded opponent to
 recover the last two or three layers of data written to disk. Wipe
 repeatedly writes special patterns to the files to be destroyed,
 using the fsync() call and/or the O_SYNC bit to force disk access.
 .
 Homepage: http://abaababa.ouvaton.org/wipe/


I've used it in the past. I can only assume it worked, since I don't
really have the means of performing any real forensic analysis of a
drive.


Paul




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