
The Great Zero Challenge Remains Unaccepted - aaronchall
http://www.hostjury.com/blog/view/195/the-great-zero-challenge-remains-unaccepted
======
aaronchall
These people are asserting that 7 passes with random data is not necessary to
irrecoverably wipe a drive.

At first glance, they seem to be making a credible point.

However, they say:

> You may not write any data to the drive or disassemble the drive.

I would think that those who are making 7 passes are assuming that an
interested actor would be willing to disassemble the drive to recover the
information.

Also, their incentives are rather weak:

> Should someone win, they get to keep the drive. They also will receive
> $40.00 USD and the title "King (or Queen) of Data Recovery".

I _would_ like to find an authoritative source that users interested in
irrecoverably wiping their data could use, but this seems to not be it.

~~~
dalke
What would count as 'authoritative'?

When this came up last, at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370895](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370895)
, I found papers like
[http://all.net/ForensicsPapers/2012-12-07-OverwrittenMagneti...](http://all.net/ForensicsPapers/2012-12-07-OverwrittenMagneticRecovery.pdf)

> To date I have found no example of any instance in which digital data
> recorded on a hard disk drive and subsequently overwritten was recovered
> from such a drive since 1985, when about 15% of the overwritten data was
> claimed to have been recovered from an modified frequency modulation (MFM)
> disk drive.

This in turn cites "Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy"
\-
[http://www.vidarholen.net/~vidar/overwriting_hard_drive_data...](http://www.vidarholen.net/~vidar/overwriting_hard_drive_data.pdf)
.

There is even more at [http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13674/is-
it-poss...](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13674/is-it-possible-
to-recover-data-on-a-zeroed-hard-drive) .

~~~
aaronchall
Thanks!

