Destroying Sensitive Data Successfully

by: jameswalsh
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Word Count: 697

The evidence of this intentional breach of the agreement with Sony Computer Entertainment was pieced together by a computer forensic expert, from the thousands of sales records purposefully deleted from the hard drive of the defendant. Poor chap!

There are many cases, in the courts, involving ‘Spoliation’. Spoliation is the deliberate destruction or modification of data that is required to be legally preserved. They just did not do a proper spoliation, folks!

Don’t live in the myth that digital data can be easily destroyed. What?!

Once the digital data is created and saved, it resides on the storage medium of the hard drive. Deleting that piece of data does not mean that it has been permanently evacuated from the hard drive. Instead, only the reference to the file’s location (which exists in an all-knowing Master File Table) has been deleted and the file has been marked for deletion.

By deleting this reference to the data’s location, the storage space taken up by the data, is made available for rewriting when required. Normally, due to the high storage capacity of modern hard drives, that overwriting could take a long time because of the vast amounts of readily available free space, on a hard drive. So an expert or the right software can easily recover your data, by having a look at your hard drive’s data, deletion notwithstanding. Many of those guys, lined up in court, found out the hard way!

Another common myth is that the contents of the hard drive cannot be recovered, if the hard drive is formatted. Unfortunately, less than 1% of the hard drive’s contents are overwritten by formatting. Formatting, generally, wipes out the directories and hence the names of the files are lost. During the formatting operation, maximum time is taken to read the disk blocks and check for bad blocks, but not for overwriting the contents.Voila! I literally gifted away my formatted hard drive to the IRS!

A simpleton’s line of thought would be to damage / mutilate the hard drive / storage medium, to prevent data recovery. That line of thought would be ummm… downright silly, if the hard drive was meant to be sold or reused. Anyway, crude methods like physical mutilation of magnetic storage media or strong magnetic fields, are insufficient to permanently destroy data on the storage media, because the physical media can be reassembled (Yoo hoo, surprise!) and sophisticated devices like electron microscopes etc., make data recovery possible (That’s unfair!).

So, a natural corollary is that other storage devices like USB drives, optical disks, flash memories, external hard drives or zip disks are also no exceptions to the possibility of recovering deleted data.

Just when most of us are agreeing that it is very easy to lose data, how is it that the forensic experts are making mincemeat of this widely known and experienced fact? Yes, data can be lost if one is careless. This loss is not permanent, unless the lost data has been overwritten or the storage device cannot be pieced together.

Obliterate the data beyond comprehension and you could still sell that reusable hard disk for a reasonable price. For this special purpose, specialised software programs are available. Most of them overwrite the contents of the hard drive, with randomly generated data. This overwriting is done many times, on the same data, to prevent any kind of meaningful data recovery even by forensic experts or sophisticated data recovery equipment. Gone forever!

Like many a defendant, in the court of law, who is faced with the damning evidence recovered from half-mutilated hard drives, do not underestimate the ability of data on any storage medium, to withstand human inflicted punishment like bending or soaking in water etc. The data is made of sterner stuff. Finish it off by subjecting the storage medium (like platters, tape etc.) to extreme tortures like pouring acid, drilling many holes, sandpapering the magnetic / storage surface, melting heat etc. (For the rest of the torture series, pack it off to hell, please!).

Simply put, do not allow even the ghost of the data or of the storage device, to hang around! You will regret for any act of mercy shown by you towards the unwanted data.

About the Author

James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. If you are concerned about data loss and would like more information on Data Recovery see http://www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk

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