Secure Erase / Wipe : Definition and Methods

joe7dust said:

" I have used Ccleaner's wipe options and then ran Recuva and all the files were still able to be recovered."


Well if everything is to be believed in this thread then neither CCleaner, cleanall, or dban 1 pass Simple are effective. And I still never got a response on whether residual magnetic recovery is possible after a zero fill using a SATA connection and recovery software.

You managed to recover data after 'clean all' via CMD?

soewhaty said:

You managed to recover data after 'clean all' via CMD?

Not I, but I think someone earlier in the thread had said that.

joe7dust said:

Not I, but I think someone earlier in the thread had said that.

That was F22 Simpilot's response to your questions - 'What data recovery software makes ccleaner wipe obsolete?'

So, unless we equate ccleaner's wipe to a 'clean all' then we can't say that it is psbl to recover data after a 'clean all'.

joe7dust said:

If secure wipe in ccleaner doesn't do it I would consider that a bug.


Worse than a bug, perhaps more like a Vulnerability of the open secret type.

If there's a native way to do this in Windows, which there is (via clean all in CMD), then I'd much rather stick to that than to CCleaner or any third party tool for that manner.

But I'm still curious to hear F22 Simpilot's views on what I asked him lastly. Hope he understands I meant it well in the name of discussion ...

F22 Simpilot said:

To answer the questions here.

The clean command as I understand it just zeros the HDD. There is no data written over the current data at all, making recovery very easy. DBAN on the other hand, while very slow will overwrite the data many times making data recovery much more harder. Like I said, you don't want to use DBAN on a flash-based medium as it can only handle so many writes. With a SSD you want to use Parted Magic's secure erase option. Secure Erase - Powerful, easy to use, and inexpensive.

Evil Maid: The Invisible Things Lab's blog: Evil Maid goes after TrueCrypt!

I have used Ccleaner's wipe options and then ran Recuva and all the files were still able to be recovered.

If all this is fact then clean is the same effectively as 1 pass dban. And CCleaner needs to patch this vulnerability of a bullshit wipe implementation.

joe7dust said:

If all this is fact then clean is the same effectively as 1 pass dban. And CCleaner needs to patch this vulnerability of a bullshit wipe implementation.

Again ... distinguish carefully between 'clean' and 'clean all' ... they are not the same thing.

What you are referring to is 'clean all' and from what became evident from the discussion here - dban overwrites a drives sectors with new data, instead of only zeroing those sectors (which is seemingly what 'clean all' does).