Re: Are "Shredded" Files Really Gone?

potkec_at_netscape.com
Date: 07/20/03 

Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 22:13:08 GMT

> mine how anything was done. Now I don't want to get too into detail
> because it may be beyond scope for this board, but there are programs
> that will determine (based on machine architecture) when random was
> called, what sector was the disk on etc;.,, etc.
>
> segment /:/ AntiOffline.com
>

Let me add something to this before I get bombarded with the "How!...'s:

For those curious on random ( rand() ) wipes, who haven't taken a comp
science course in school... Functions are the same across the board on
certain comps. Eg: An SGI machine will go through different motions
when making certain sys calls.

If say someone had physical access to the machine, and determined what
time/day/etc the file was created, it is possible to recreate the file
after it has been wiped based on the structure of the disk. When you
defrag/optimize you're rearranging the bits, hence if someone had
physical access it wouldn't matter if they determined the aforemen-
tioned date/time/etc., since things are now diff on the disk sectors.

I know of someone who went to IT and Harvard who wrote a program to
do just that recreate something after it has been purged even if it
was written over a few times if you had physical access to the comp
in question. It was processor specific and it determined how the
system made calls to wipe the file, backtracked and actually did
recreate files which had been written over numerous times.

segment /:/ AntiOffline . com

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