Questions tagged [deletion]
Secure deletion of data.
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How to verify secure erasure of Android and Apple mobile devices
I'm aware of how to securely sanitise and verify the sanitisation of data from both HDDs and SSDs, but mobile phones complicate this due to being there a lot of proprietary layers standing between the ...
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Parted Magic Secure Erase Verification Level
I've been experimenting with the latest Parted Magic Secure Erase to wipe HDDs and SSDs. After the Secure Erase completes, I noticed in the logs that the verification level is 10%. Excerpt from the ...
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Is it possible to delete all traces and files on a mac? [duplicate]
Is it possible to delete all traces and files on a mac, so no one can recover files and there will be no traces at all for this files or any activity?
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Can the photos/videos I deleted a year ago can still be on my iPhone or on the Internet?
I have been getting paranoid lately and decided to ask for your insight on this issue. A year ago, I took photos of some personal information (cc, passport, etc), and deleted them a month later, along ...
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Does crypto shredding count as deletion in regards to CCPA?
I have a compliance question around crypto shredding and CCPA. I'm basically just wondering if crypto shredding is sufficient to comply with the CCPA customer deletion requests.
I know that crypto ...
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Benefit of remote wipe when the drive is encrypted?
How much is "remote wipe" beneficial for company data protection on company laptops, assuming that the storage is encrypted?
I understand it so that only determined, targeting attackers are ...
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Permanently erasing a file
As far as I know, there is a table of files present in the hard drive that does not contain the data of each file but can point you to it.
When you delete a file, the record of it gets deleted from ...
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Detect use a private key by more than one or by someone other than the owner [closed]
I'm designing a protocol over the SSL but I faced a challenge. In the network each user takes a private key from authority. I want to just the owner can use his/her the private key. there are two ...
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How to make information unrecoverable?
I manage a company's equipment and the manager has used a piece of equipment for the last 3 years. He told me, that he will give that equipment to one of the employees. However, he has told me to ...
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Fetching GPG private key from Linux server to decrypt files on a Win 10 computer in production
I have a need to fetch automatically the GPG private key from a Linux server to decrypt files on a Windows 10 computer in production.
There are a few challenges here:
How to assure SCP from the ...
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How to determine start and end bytes of LUKS header?
How can I determine the exact start byte and exact end byte of a LUKS header on a block storage device?
I use Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) for Full Disk Encryption (FDE), so all of the data on my ...
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How to securely erase the free space on an SSD in windows 10?
I would like to wipe ALL free space on my SSD which Windows 10 is installed on, so that no previously deleted file can be recovered. How can I achieve this?
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Preventing data remanence at filesystem / OS level
We all know that deleting a file from your computer does not really erase it, but only marks as free the memory where the file was written, so that, until such memory is not overwritten, the file can ...
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Is it sufficient to use a hard disk magnet to corrupt/erase floppy data?
I would like to make data, in many (more than 250) old floppies, unreadable/unrecoverable.
I have some HDDs that I can take apart. Their magnet is sufficient to do the job to make it unreadable to ...
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How can information be recovered after it has been overwritten (single pass) by a secure deletion program? [duplicate]
We know that information can be retreived after it has been deleted. There are several tools for file "undeletion" (Recuva, FTK, some tools contained in Caine, etc.)
I have heard as well, that data ...
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How to detect file or file system tampering
I would like to know if the following is possible:
Is it possible to detect a file that has been put into my file system using back dating? Are there any trace artifacts left behind which can help to ...
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Can deleting a non-inherited object more than once be exploited for code execution?
When assigning priority for a bug, we had an internal discussion whether in C++ deleting an object more than once can result in code execution if the pointer to object can be corrupted. For the ...
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How to securely delete a file after it was insecurely deleted (in linux)
How can I securely delete/shred a file after I accidentally deleted the file insecurely?
Let's say I have Debian Linux installed on a laptop with a 1000T spinning hard disk (so putting aside wear ...
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How to completely destroyed all data from an iPhone before reselling it?
I would wish to know more about how to erase 100% data of a used iPhone.
Basically, technician from Apple Store only said “Erase & Clear” within the iPhone setting could do all the work perfectly ...
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How to make an undeletable, hidden file, which persists after formatting an SD card?
My SD card was stolen some weeks ago. I can't know which SD card is mine, because the thief formatted it. As such, I bought a new one.
In order to prevent such situations in the future, I thought of ...
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Does renaming and emptying all the content of a file before deletion make it unrecoverable?
When I delete a file, I rename it to new.txt, open the file in a text editor, press Ctrl+A, Backspace, Ctrl+S to delete all the content and save it as an empty file and then Shift+Delete to ...
user203050
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How to safely wipe a USB flash drive [duplicate]
I want to wipe all residual data left behind even after a format on a regular 64GB fash drive, the ones someone can scan and recover data. What's the most efficient but quickest way to do this? Any ...
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List of valuable folders for preventing their deletions
I am writing software that has an option to delete all files is a user-specified directory. This is the usual case for software. For example, cpp compiler has an option to delete all previously ...
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How secure is the windows Cipher command?
So in windows CMD, there is the Cipher.exe Command Line tool. Supposedly it will allow you to fully overwrite empty disk space with 0x00 and 0xFF. (with the /w parameter)
There is some further ...
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How to protect company sensitive data from being deleted by a user when data is on their computer?
There more than 300 computers and more than 400 users are available. We face two incidents recently when critical users(who has critical data) leave from company.We have deleted their data when they ...
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Can you wipe a USB flash drive so securely that it's impossible to recover deleted files through forensic analysis? [duplicate]
Internal SSD can be wiped with TRIM, but USB sticks are external SSD. They're apparently difficult to wipe securely enough to make forensic analysis of the device impossible. This question has been ...
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Does the destruction of sensitive information limit the choice of hard drives to non-flash based devices?
Working with a non-profit organization,it's common to reuse hard drives that have previously stored highly sensitive information such as medical and financial records. This is primarily driven by cost-...
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Is it possible for the government to recover data from a encrypted ssd (veracrypt) that was wiped
Just as the title states I'm wondering if its possible for the government to recover data from a encrypted ssd that was wiped? Thanks in advance!
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How important is it to delete disk partitions when wiping devices?
The command lsblk returns the following output that lists 4 partitions.
sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 8M 0 part
├─sda2 8:2 0 40G 0 part /
├─sda3 8:3 0 883.8G ...
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Should a secure ATA erase be performed on a non-SSD drive?
When running the command hdparm -I /dev/sda the following output is generated.
ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: WDC WD10JPVX-75JC3T0
Serial ...
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Do all hard drives support Device Configuration Overlay (DCO) and Host Protected Area (HPA) for data sanitization?
In the absence of physical destruction of hard drives including flash and SSD (since they are often re-used in different parts of the business or re-purposed for donation), the hard drives are ...
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System Encryption With Veracrypt/Truecrypt- What is the difference between Wipe Mode "None" and 3 pass, 1 pass etc?
First I wanted to make sure we're talking about using a Non-SSD Hard drive. I know SSD drives work differently.
Here would be a good reference/guide on system encryption:
https://www.howtogeek.com/...
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Can we wipe an Android phone completely using Encryption and Factory Wipe? (Samsung Galaxy S7 to be exact)
Can we wipe an Android phone completely using Encryption and Factory Wipe? (Samsung Galaxy S7 to be exact)
I have a Samsung Galaxy S7. I believe cell phones use flash storage (like SSD) and its not ...
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Verification After Data Wipe
A lot of data wipe algorithms have the final wiping pass with random characters. They discuss about verification after the wipe. An example of this is from this link:
https://www.datanumen.com/blogs/...
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Howto restore factory default state of an USB pen drive?
The proper way to secure erase a SSD is to issue the SECURITY ERASE UNIT command. Then the SSD controller should send a BLOCK ERASE command to all physical blocks.
One caveat: the SSD has to be ...
user186877
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Secure way to wipe an entire SSD? [duplicate]
I've read some articles and they appear to suggest the idea of using the dd command to wipe an entire SSD before encrypting it. The drive in question is a Samsung 970 EVO PCIe NVMe V-NAND M.2 2280 ...
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How to securely erase JavaScript parameters after use? [duplicate]
When I pass a password as a parameter to a function, I presume it will end up on a stack or heap.
When this function returns I'd expect that my password is still in memory somewhere until it is ...
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What type of data can be recovered from the swap file / page file and thumbs file
This question follows on from a previously posted question on recovery of data from a wiped disk. I have been informed that no files have been found on the computer on the hard disk or in the deleted ...
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What can be recovered? Securely deleted files
I’ve recently got into a little trouble and need advice. It seems I may have inadvertently downloaded a illegal file from a p2p network (along with 100’s of other legal files). I was certainly not ...
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Linux command to wipe files on an SD Card?
Are there any commands, tools or python libraries to securely wipe specific files from an SD or micro SD card (devices that use flash memory)?
For example, with a regular magnetic hard drive, you can ...
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Is corrupting the ciphertext corruption a good erasure?
Normally when you wipe a drive there are still ghost remains of the data even after overwriting the disk multiple times. So I was wondering if you could encrypt the drive and then overwrite the ...
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Secure erase hard drive [duplicate]
What device/method do you usually use to securely erase a hard drive?
The situation is, we have hard drives that we want to use somewhere else, and don't want any data to get recovered later,
I can ...
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Does zeroing a file on Android work similar to a regular HDD?
On a regular PC hard drive, files aren't actually deleted, so they can still be recovered from the raw data on the drive. So there is the process called zeroing out a file when you delete it so that ...
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How completely wipe information of overwritten files and folder?
I have only a basic understanding of how files are written in a hard disk. Here I assume the files are overwritten this way.
File A is deleted
Its address is removed and showed vacant
New File B is ...
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Wipe inaccessible hard drive before returning to vendor
My external backup drive broke recently. It just beeps but does not show up in Explorer but in Device Manager.
Sadly this drive contains my unencrypted backups. (Not a failure I will repeat). Is ...
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Encryption - how to secure files - decrypting exposes them on SSD
Let's say I have an encrypted file. Now I decrypt it but since my computer only has SSD, i decrypt it on the SSD drive. Say, I make changes or I finish using the decrypted file so I encrypt it again. ...
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GDPR Deletion Request Tracking Paradox - Suppression Lists
I work at a large-ish tech company with hundreds of websites and some large web applications with a very large number of users.
I am planning to propose that we have a central system to track ...
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Wiping an SSD with Parted Magic seemed too quick
I'm selling a computer with an SSD (it's a Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1). I wiped the drive using Parted Magic. I used the ATA method. I'm not sure what that is but it was the only setting available. It ...
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How is cryptoshredding a "sole pragmatic option for data disposal in the cloud"?
I'm studying for the CCSP exam and I think I'm missing something here...
In reviewing data destruction/disposal methods, I'm aware that an on-premise IT environment has several options:
Physical ...
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Erasing files and passes - how to understand them? [duplicate]
A few months ago, I downloaded Edenwaith Permanent Eraser from the edenwaith website and set it to DoE (3x) in the preferences.
I am using Mac Mini 2011, MacOS Sierra, and use it to delete files and ...
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