>> I see lots of talk of *boken* hard drives, but not much about
>> deliberately erased media.
> 
> They've got the equipment for that.  I used to talk with them 
> occasionally, and they did do forensic analysis for law enforcement back 
> then.  Don't know if they still do.

Forensic analysis isn't too hard if the person didn't get a change to 
destroy their data before the PC was ceased. ;-)

>>> Or use something like this: http://freshmeat.net/projects/mobiusft/
>> I can't even find any documentation explaining what this *is*...
> 
> It's a forensic data toolkit.  Used for investigating criminal activity 
> that's been stored on hard drives and then wiped/erased/whatever.  Often 
> times, you don't recover a file, but you recover data on individual 
> blocks (think like chkdsk).

Right. But if I've erased every individual block on the drive (rather 
than just, say, reinstalling Windows on it) then it won't find anything.

>>> - people have been convicted using evidence recovered from a drive
>>> without using "a microscope" (and BTW, how would that help?  The data
>>> is encoded in a magnetic field, a microscope won't see that).
>> I didn't mean a light microscope - I was actually thinking of a Magnetic
>> Force Microscope...
> 
> Well, all I know is that I know people who actually *do* this kind of 
> work on a regular basis.
> 
> Doing a DoD style wipe is generally sufficient, but as others pointed 
> out, the point from a data security standpoint is to make the cost of 
> recovery more than the value of the data when recovered.  In *most* 
> cases, a wipe is sufficient, but it really depends on how valuable the 
> data is to your competition.

1. These drives probably never contained any live data in the first 
place. ("Live data" as in data generated in our lab.)

2. Any such data they did contain is going to consist of a huge chunk of 
numbers, with little or nothing to identify what the hell they relate to.

3. Any such data will be at least 5 years old.

Really, it would be far, *far* easier to just have somebody come work 
for us and secretly spy on our activities... Much cheaper than James 
Bond data recovery techniques.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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