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Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061
I can't find a better example of why you should never, *ever* have your browser cache to disk. This has nothing to do with protecting those who should know better, but it does reduce the chances of any unsavoury material finding its way onto your PC.
I did look into whether it was economical to create an add-on designed to seek out and destroy this sort of malicious data dumping by looking for the CRC of known bad files in much the same way as an antivirus works. Strangely enough none of the major AV producers have added this feature.
I would actually bet that if 1000 people did a scan with such a program it would find numerous thumbnails on at least a quarter of their machines.
Oh, and its well worth owning a "nukerbox", whose sole purpose is to sanitize drives by overwriting with random radioisotope derived data, in order to ensure they are beyond recovery then providing a label with drive serial number, SMART status, date/time and Pass/Fail to stick on the drive casing to satisfy Data Protection etc.
Call it cheap insurance.
Also avoids destroying perfectly good drives just because they "might" have something remotely dodgy on them, this can get expensive if you are like me and get numerous donated machines with unknown history.
Another interesting discovery is that SSDs are actually far less secure than HDDs because the sector reallocations occur on an entire 32K block and depend on how many times that sector has been written to. Often a block is marked as bad when in fact only a single cell is bad, so all the data is recoverable. This can happen even if the entire drive has been zerofilled multiple times and potentially even one intact chip on a smashed drive can be taken out and read back with the correct hardware.
This is a serious issue with high density drives, as often a consumer level 128GB drive could have up to 32 individual chips which can survive even if the drive is reduced to a pile of shrapnel in a "normal" sanitizer reserved for conventional HDDs.
Contrary to popular belief even a cracked chip is not always 100% unrecoverable, depending on the location it can be possible to decapsulate the chip and reattach bond wires to the intact sections. Cost for this can be as low as $20K which is not much if the data is valuable.
Registered Member #1334
Joined: Tue Feb 19 2008, 04:37PM
Location: Nr. London, UK
Posts: 615
I run Piriform CCleaner every week just to clean everything up and keep caches under control - its free & very good. It'll wipe free space etc., but as you noted, USB sticks and SSDs in general do dynamic reallocation of sectors, so NO software cleaner is 100% reliable for any type of SSD (cards, sticks, drives etc.).
In my previous role, I've had to recover data from an SSD using a forensic recovery company who also work for the British Police - They desolder the memory chips and read them directly... I've also had this done for mobiles where the user has no backup (or its corrupted) and they've trashed their 'phone (in that case, run it over with their car).
Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061
LOL!! i have a Nokia xpressmusic here which is a nice curved shape after presumably being run over.
I've noticed that many people leave memory cards in the phone by mistake when discarding them, got a nice 512MB this way . Also found that broken cameras often have intact memory.. -A
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Reasons never to use hard drive cacheing
