Some of the most commonly overlooked security holes are discussed below.
- Page File
The virtual memory storage of the Windows operating system is called the page file. The operating system may store any information from the memory to the disk whenever it wants. This means that the page file may contain passwords, pieces of documents and other sensitive information.
Since the operating system locks the paging file while it is running, the file cannot be accessed using standard file operations. There are applications that claim to overwrite the paging file by allocating huge amounts of memory, but this method may freeze your computer and even then the space allocated by applications cannot be accessed and not all the available space on the paging file is necessarily overwritten.
For information on how to erase the paging file, see Erasing the Page File. - Filenames
Unless you name your files with arbitrary names, the name of a file can reveal information about the file contents. Eraser will overwrite the filename after erasing the file data. Names of the files you have previously deleted may also still be stored in the file system table; Eraser will overwrite them when you erase unused disk space - Bad Sectors
When an area on the disk gets damaged for some reason, the disk electronics mark the area as containing bad sectors. These bad sectors cannot be accessed so the data still stored in them cannot be erased either. Peter Gutmann has discussed this subject further in chapter Further Problems with Magnetic Media of his paper Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory.