Disk Wipe Methods

[KRFinch at dstsystems.com]

There's no way to take data off of the disk so it can't be read by someone
willing to spend the money to do it.  After talking to a friend of mine
that worked in Naval Intelligence about it, he said that he wouldn't even
start to feel comfortable about covering his tracks until he had
overwritten all of the tracks on the disk at least 1500 times.  It's
amazing what you can pull off a drive with an electron microscope.

Don't take the risk.  Disks are cheap compared to the cost of losing a
client or getting sued.  Buy a new one for each client.

My $0.02...

- Kevin

                                                                                                    
                   
                    Dustin Decker                                                                   
                   
                    <dustind at moon-lite.com       To:     kclug at kclug.org                            
                   
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                    owner-kclug at marauder.i                                                          
                   
                    lliana.net                                                                      
                   
                                                                                                    
                   
                                                                                                    
                   
                    01/20/2003 03:13 PM                                                             
                   
                                                                                                    
                   
                                                                                                    
                   

Howdy all,
I have an intersting project on my plate at the day job.  Once in a blue
moon (prolly more like each full moon) we overnight a 30GB Iomega USB
drive to a client, they put a backup of their database on it (between 4
and 10 GB) and ship it back to us.

Eventually, the drive will be sent to another client.  We're dealing with
personally identifiable information in the health care mode here, so in
the interest of avoiding a HIPAA snaufu I'm quite serious about ensuring
that there aren't any traces of the previous clients' db on the drive when
it ships.  I've been making use of BCWipe on the Windows platform to
accomplish this to the DoD 5200.28 standard, but I'm interested in
throwing this on a Linux box to get it done as this is an extremely time
consuming process.  (Would prefer to start it on Linux and walk away.)

Any suggestions on utilities in the Linux world that can do this?
Dustin

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| Dustin Decker                     |
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