Until recently, I had not heard of slack space existing within files. However, I found this site, which says the following:
"In addition to this slack space at the end of all files, the interior slack spaces of the compound files created by applications such as Word® and Excel® can also hold sensitive data scavanged by the reallocation of "deleted" clusters to those files."
From what I gather, the FAT file system wouldn't initialize slack data in OLE files, but NTFS would.
The above example seems to indicate a (rare) case in which unallocated space could inadvertently end up in a file. I'm wondering if there are other situations in which this is possible. If so, I'm also wondering which file types are susceptible to this and which aren't. I had never heard of this scenario before, so I'm wondering how common it is!
"In addition to this slack space at the end of all files, the interior slack spaces of the compound files created by applications such as Word® and Excel® can also hold sensitive data scavanged by the reallocation of "deleted" clusters to those files."
From what I gather, the FAT file system wouldn't initialize slack data in OLE files, but NTFS would.
The above example seems to indicate a (rare) case in which unallocated space could inadvertently end up in a file. I'm wondering if there are other situations in which this is possible. If so, I'm also wondering which file types are susceptible to this and which aren't. I had never heard of this scenario before, so I'm wondering how common it is!
