Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: shoehorn on October 05, 2012, 10:30 am
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Well I started with good intentions. I used my Ubuntu Netbook for SR exclusively (I've got two). I became overconfident and began to not only browse SR but buy stuff on all of my machines inluding an Imac (dvd busted), a Mcabook air /with DVD and possibly a WinXp box.
I'm probably being paranoid but I did get a love letter from Canada Customs and have got nothing since although I think that I should have by now.
I understand that there is a US gov't spec for complete elimination of ALL data on a machine. Something about 35 passes. I used to be in IT about 10 years ago and "Encase" seemed to be "the one to beat".
I don't use these machines for anything important so no need to back up anything. Just a PITA.
Does anyone know of any software (preferably acessable online) that will completely wipe the drives of these different OS drives as per this US 35x spec?
Thanks!
BTW, I'm trying to come off all of these drugs so SR will be of less importance to me.
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Dban is an excellent piece of software and does the job beautifully.
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DBAN - 2or 3 wipes --more than enough !
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I am in a similar position to the OP in that I wish to format and start afresh, for security purposes as I'm not satisfied with my current setup.
Currently I have several partitions on my HDD. Will DBAN wipe all partitions, or will I be able to select which ones to wipe?
Ideally I'd like to wipe my partition with Windows on it, but keep my partitions that have music/photos etc.
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First of all, thanks to all. My main problem is DVD drives, I guess that I could get a DVD drive for me EEEpC netbooks (Ubuntu). I've never seen one but I've never needed one but I'm sure that something workable exists. My main problem is my 2006 Imac.DVD busted for years but never bothered to get it fixed because I rarely used it. Does anyone know if such an external dvd exists for it. Not worth bringing to the Apple store to be repaired considering it's age.
Very seldom use my WinXp laptop. I only take it out of the closet once every few months to run the system and virus updates.Tor may be installed but I haven't bought anything on it.
Is their anything That I can download that would be equally as effective? not requiring a DVD drive?
I guess that I got tired of typing in that 20=something Truescrypy password which starred my carelessness. Anyways entered rehab today so hopefully all of this will be a thing of the past.
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You only do to do a single pass to completely erase a drive. Once you overwrite data it is GONE. The ancient theoretical papers on seeing 'shadows' between tracks were only theories with no practical application and drives are now tens of thousands of times denser.
With an SSD you can simply use SecureErase, one it will wipe a disk in seconds (on a HDD the command writes zeroes but obv. takes longer).
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secureerase exists for all recent ata drives not just ssds
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If you run Ubuntu from a hard disk drive, USB stick, or live CD, you can use it to detect other hard drives and securely wipe them. You can do this from the command line, no need to install further software.
To see a list of all memory devices connected to your computer, run the command:
$ sudo fdisk -l
It will show you a lot of information about every hard disk, but the piece you need to look for is it's location:
Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500103689016 bytes
The location of the 500GB hard drive is: /dev/sda
To wipe this disk, run the following command:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M
Your command line will be busy for a few hours (depending on the size of your disk), but afterwards it will be completely overwritten with zeros, and practically unrecoverable.
I'm writing a guide on using Ubuntu to access Silk Road, and this subject will also be covered in detail. Coming soon!
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You only do to do a single pass to completely erase a drive. Once you overwrite data it is GONE. The ancient theoretical papers on seeing 'shadows' between tracks were only theories with no practical application and drives are now tens of thousands of times denser.
With an SSD you can simply use SecureErase, one it will wipe a disk in seconds (on a HDD the command writes zeroes but obv. takes longer).
+1 to this. You only really need to do one zero pass on a hard drive. Even if the NSA was on the case with an electron microscope analyzing your platters they would still have to try to determine if the bit they are looking at (which is now 0) was previously a 1 or a 0.
Also, another good bootable wiping tool is Active Kill Disk. The free version supports a zero wipe. If you get the pirated version you can do all the fancy DoD and gutmann wipes if you're really that paranoid.
If you dont have a DVD drive the easiest solution would be to get an external USB DVD rom drive to boot too.
In OSX you can use your recovery disk (or if you're using Lion or Mountian lions recovery partion) and boot to it. From there you can use disk utility. You should have the option to zero wipe a drive from the disk utility.