The Urban Legend of Multipass Hard Disk Overwrite

morkhans

morkhans

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Multipass disk overwrite and the “DoD 5220-22-M standard 3-pass wipe” are, at best, urban legends. At worst, they are a waste of time and electricity.
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https://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/16130-The-Urban-Legend-of-Multipass-Hard-Disk-Overwrite.html

And if you want to skip reading the entire article...
Therefore, a single pass overwrite with any arbitrary value (randomly chosen or not) is sufficient to render the original HDD data effectively irretrievable.
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thus zero the disk dd /dev/null > /dev/sda

or just blowfish encrypt everything :D
 
Or secure erase using the drives ata commands which is much faster.
 
Or copy goatse/tubgirl pics with random filenames to the HDD till it's filled up.

Then quickerase it.

Yes, I know it's nasty.

But it'll teach sniffers not to sniff at a clean hard drive in order to salvage some data...
 
The_Librarian said:
Or copy goatse/tubgirl pics with random filenames to the HDD till it's filled up.

Then quickerase it.

Yes, I know it's nasty.

But it'll teach sniffers not to sniff at a clean hard drive in order to salvage some data...
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:sick:
 
morkhans said:
Therefore, a single pass overwrite with any arbitrary value (randomly chosen or not) is sufficient to render the original HDD data effectively irretrievable.
Click to expand...

Correct, you will never get the data back once it has been overwritten. DoD standards and multiple overwriting are superfluous. If you want to clean absolutely everything though you'll need to zero all sectors, those in the P and G-LIST as well. (The 'bad' sectors that the drive remaps as it's used and degrades, these are no longer accessible to the end user, even when 'wiping' the drive there is data still stored in them and these are ignored at a software level)
 
South_Bit said:
If you want to clean absolutely everything though you'll need to zero all sectors, those in the P and G-LIST as well. (The 'bad' sectors that the drive remaps as it's used and degrades, these are no longer accessible to the end user, even when 'wiping' the drive there is data still stored in them and these are ignored at a software level)
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I've noticed that if you use the ata secure erase command your drives size increases, this got to do with zeroing the p/g lists?
 
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