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Eraser keeping a history in the schedule is quite a privacy leak. Anyone who wants to go snooping would look in the Eraser history to find names of erased files ! Admittedly they would only retrieve the file names such as “My secret document.doc” but that is evidence / proof that the user had...

Here in England at the end of a year the Queen gives out new years honours (knighthoods) etc. The idea is that ordinary people who do remarkable things during their life, who would normally go unnoticed receive some recognition for their efforts. I thought it would be fun if Eraser did the...

Eraser is a free and open source privacy tool for windows. Erasers purpose is to help honest law abiding people maintain their privacy and to prevent data theft by securely overwriting a users private data on request. The developers insist that everyone should have free access to good security...

A computer hard disk is divided into small areas called clusters. A file can cover several clusters however it is unusual that the size of a file turns out to be an exact fit of a cluster size. A cluster tip is a portion of a disk cluster that has not been fully taken up with the file written...

When you use Eraser to overwrite a file Eraser actually has to write the same amount of data as the target file size. This means that if you overwrite a 1GB file Eraser has to write 1GB to overwrite it. However this is only true if you select a single pass, should a user select the Gutmann...

Hello. The Eraser Project Team has been developing Eraser V6 this last year and it is nearing completion. Eraser V6 is a complete rewrite of the classic Eraser V5. This is not a simple patching or updating task but a 100% fresh start written with all the knowledge gained from the original V5...

Challenge It will be interesting to see the conclusion to this. :) If proved correct, this will save hard drives from unnecessary wear and Eraser users a lot of time !! A single pseudorandom pass has been my favourite method for some years now. I suspect it will stay that way ! :D

Hello ! Well I guess I shall be the first to post in the shiny new Eraser forensic forum ! :D I suppose a good place to start would be (assuming no third party software is installed) what are the areas on a hard drive with a standard Windows + Office installation that could be a threat to a...

This accusation is more commonly thrown at encryption software. The usual question is “if you have got nothing to hide then why do you need to encrypt it ?”. Well, the next time you hear that little gem from someone ask to look through the contents of their pockets or bag, when they object ask...

It would be irresponsible of any secure deletion software developer to 100% guarantee that absolutely nothing could be recovered from a drive. There are just too many things that could go wrong. Faulty write heads, bad sectors, power cuts, user bad practice, backup software, temp files...

The 35 pass Gutmann method was conceived at a time when very old technology pre early 1990’s was employed in hard drives. It was used to allow for the inaccuracy of writing heads fitted to those drives which could result in the head writing slightly to one side of the target data. The accuracy...

If you spend any time studying encryption you will see the term military grade on a lot of products, the term is pointless. Mathematics and science rule in the digital world not the military. Peter Gutmann suggests that pre-determined patterns, such as "military approved" ones could actually...

For most people Erasers default setting of a single pseudorandom pass will be sufficient on any medium except vintage hard drives. This will defeat all software recovery programs and possibly microscopic forensic analysis also. If you are extremely concerned about the intenseness of your...

Hi I am using Eraser 5.8.7. Beta on XP Pro SP3. NTFS. I noticed in the change log it said this “ Further complicate forensics: Set MACE to invalid values (NTFS only)” On my C drive I wiped my free space, cluster tips and directory entries with the new beta and then looked at it with WinHex...

Hi I am getting some scary looking error messages on the Eraser Trac pages. It has been like that for a few weeks now, any chance you could have a look at that Joel ?

Hi :( The forum seems to have lost some posts and reverted back to about 5 or 6 days ago. We have unfortunately lost an interesting post from a new member who was working on the source of V5 as he claimed to have discovered a flaw. Regrettably I cannot remember his username as he only posted...

Hi :) I was just wondering if anyone else is having problems with the Eraser Forum ? There is a very good chance the problems I am experiencing are my fault (for various reasons) but just to confirm it could others please comment. The search function is perhaps not as good as it could be. I...

If you have used the wipe free space option in Eraser and subsequently noticed that your “free space” has dramatically reduced then try one or all of the following. Search your computer for the following file and delete it. ~erafswd.tmp Delete and disable system restore. Empty your Recycle...

Here are a few useful links to help answer most questions regarding DBAN and creating a DBAN boot CD's. http://dban.sourceforge.net/faq/CDBurnerXP.html http://dban.sourceforge.net/faq/ http://dban.sourceforge.net/download/readme.txt

I just thought I would share this linkto a very interesting page I found on Sanitizing Hard Disks. Of course Eraser gets a mention !! :)