Need to Cleanse my HD

[mr hersh]

To the techincal team on the forum here, my teenage son went to locations and downloaded pic's on to my work laptop. What can I do to remove and sanitize my hard drive? DOes this need to re-formatted?

Let me know

you can email me at dhersh9615@aol.com

[2long4u]

Well you can reformat the computer. Or you can just delete all of the files he has put on their. Is it running unstable or something? Why do you need to clean it now? If you are returning it to the company then I highly recommend a format. Just my opinion.

[ofcdn]

It is forever on your hard drive. However, using forensic hardware you can erase and rewrite over the hard drive 7 times (Department of Defense...DOD) in a seamingly random, bit by bit pattern to ensure that if someone does want t0 access the info it would be extremely expensive/hard. A real forensic cloner will run you anywhere from $800 - 3500. A reformat and a clean install of your software will probably keep you out of trouble, unless they hire someone like me to investigate you :D

[2long4u]

LOL in which case a new drive is less expensive. Destroy the old drive put the new drive in then the feds will be left empty handed. But if its just for the company Id just format and let them have it. I dont really think anyone would care to dig enough to find a couple raunchy pics on your pc. If you are involved in some child porn crap then thats a different story. They will and should do what it takes to recover your drive

[CHeckPTmy.Foundstone]

I would STRONGLY disregard "reformatting your hard drive" as suggested on here. Besides the fact that I could recoved it very very easily, its a poor idea to just do that without knowing what configuration and security tools your company uses to track these things.

Some co's talk BIG talk and never have anything in place if they wanted to catch you guys. Other co's do not joke around with this. Many are millitary or fed gov't related and some are just hardcore like that. I used to work for some of the co's that design some of the tools to allow IT departments to track everything you all do. A reformat only look suspicious. TRUST ME.

What are you set up as user and group wise? Are you a local admin? Do you ever VPN in to work? Is this a gov't related co? Are they are super hardcore biotech with trade secrets and things of that nature on there? If you have dialed up since the incident (VPN'd in) & actually some tools out there now where you just have to be online and they can sniff you out pretty damn fast vpn or not...but there are some legal issues there.

Email me back if you want some real advice from someone who has worked on the forensics side of very high profile security co's like McAfee, Fstone and Checkpt..overseas at their headquarters in Tel Aviv.

I don't want to scare you, but I definately don't want you to get busted over doing something stupid like a reformat. Try reformatting 7 times zeroing out every thing. Then it is pretty damn hard to recover data, but yes it still can be done. You prob have NTFS partitions which suck for you and make it very easy for us to recover data.

If you are that worried about this, contact me and I have a program that will render your drive useless. 100% worthless. The tech's there probably will think its just a dead hard drive with floppy platters. If you are going to do it --do it right. 99% of IT people have no idea about this little program. I have had to use it many times to protect trade secrets. It works.

CheckPTmyFoundSTONE

[2long4u]

Again I would also say destroy the drive. Its the safest way. He is correct in saying this.

[ofcdn]

There isn't any software that will clean a hard drive 100%. If the Gov't or a Forensic expert gets their hands on it and it is important enough, they can retrieve the data. But most employers don't go to those lengths. Just remember...if software covered it up, software can uncover it. Plus, the use of a good Forensic Cloner and Forensic software WILL find it. just replace it with a new one. If you reformat it, they will wonder what you were hiding. If you are doing something illegal, as opposed to violating policy, you should be worried. :D

oh, I know about those type of programs...Knoppix (free program) will see them and so will some other linux based programs (linux will mount just about anything), otherwise they will look like a bad hard drive.