Is ccleaner a secure disk and browsing wiper?

[pwhack]

Hi there,

 

I have been using ccleaner for some time now for secure disk wiping 35 passes and browser cleaner, and after seeing a post about files been recoverable after using ccleaner, I would just like to be reassured that the wiping processes in cleaner are indeed secure is as good as it gets with these software methods.

 

Hoping someone might be able to answer my question

 

thank you very much

 

pwhack

[ident]

Hi there,

 

I have been using ccleaner for some time now for secure disk wiping 35 passes and browser cleaner, and after seeing a post about files been recoverable after using ccleaner, I would just like to be reassured that the wiping processes in cleaner are indeed secure is as good as it gets with these software methods.

 

Hoping someone might be able to answer my question

 

thank you very much

 

pwhack

 

1 overpass is sufficient in making files not recoverable. 35 passes is out dated and a waste of time. There is lots of information if you search the forums about 35 passes.

[kroozer]

pwhack, if you run the free Recuva you can test the effectiveness of the 1-pass vs. multiple pass overwrite. You'll see that a single pass is sufficient.

[Andavari]

35 passes is out dated and a waste of time.

35 passes also wears out the hard disk faster too!

[mr don]

1 overpass is sufficient in making files not recoverable. 35 passes is out dated and a waste of time. There is lots of information if you search the forums about 35 passes.

That depends on how badly you need your data gone. It has been suggested that up to the 7 pass NSA level may be possible to dig up using Electron Scanning microscopes or other methodology involving indexing the former state of the 0 & 1 data on a drive to calculate what it had been prior to a disk write.

 

If you have normal data, probably 1 pass is good. If you have data the government really wants to get hold of, I would say more than 1 pass is needed with all the high tech stuff they have.

 

The age of the drive in question really matters too.

 

Back in 1996, Peter Gutman, computer science professor at Auckland University in New Zealand, published a paper proposing how data could be recovered from hard disk or floppy disk sectors that had been overwritten. The idea behind this is based on the fact that the read/write heads are never precisely positioned over the same exact area twice and that by using electron-microscopes (Scanning Tunneling Microscopy) it would be possible to find a 'shadow' of the previously written sector.

 

The hard drives mentioned in this 1996 paper are MFM and RLL drives, which were the first generation of hard drives used for personal computers (IBM called them the Winchester drives). The largest MFM and RLL drives made got up to about 130MB in size and were quickly replaced by IDE/ATA hard drives. At the time Professor Gutman's paper was published, the MFM/RLL hard disk technology was already 10 years old. [see the time lines of hard driver here and here].

 

Technology has continued to advance for hard drives and the most important advances have been in the form of higher bit density per square inch. Getting the data that small has required evolutionary changes in magnetic storage and head design. When Professor Gutman did his research, the track spacing between groups of sectors was very wide and the bit density was low, thereby providing a valid means of recovering a shadow of the previous sector. Of course if you could only read just the top level of bits per sector that had not been overwritten, you would only be able to recover an extremely small percentage of the original sector--at best you would only be able to recover just a small sliver of the original sector.

 

Today's hard disks have a bit density far greater and the track sizes are extremely small--down to the nano scale in size. Notice the advances in the past 10 years:

 

1996: IBM stores 5 billion bits per square inch on a platter.

2006: Hitachi stores 345 gigabits per square inch using perpendicular magnetic recording.

 

If you have important data such as your a secret spy or something, you better be hoping on more than 1 pass, because chances are, they can recover it.

[ident]

I'm sorry you felt the need to write all that out mr don but that's really off topic and adding totally confusing information for this particular user. 1 Pass is more the sufficient here.

 

If you wish to read my views on the possible recovery on over written data, which has not actually come from the data it self but from the over spill of data either side of the data track then feel free to Here

 

But that's all i will say on the matter in this topic. I'm sure we can both use are common sense here to realize when some one posts about secure browser cleaning they are not expected there data to be put under a forensic scope.