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Wipe your drives securely with a hidden Windows 7 tool

Mike Halsey MVP — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 07:05:26 +0000

It’s always a worry when you get rid of a PC or hard drive that all sorts of personal data could be sitting on it waiting to be stolen. This is even more important when it comes to business computers.

There have always been a huge variety of hard disk wiping packages available from third-parties, but did you know that Windows 7 has it’s own free in-built tool for securely erasing, not just whole hard disks, but specific folders as well?

The cipher.exe tool has been around for years now and is used for managing the EFS (Encrypted File System) feature that preceeded Bitlocker and was first introduced with Windows 2000. It’s run from the Command Prompt (as an Administrator).

With Windows 7 though Microsoft have added a new switch to the tool, and it’s one you should definitely use with care!

The command is Simply cipher /w x:\folder where you would substitute x:\folder for the location you want wiped, for instance your D:\ drive or your C:\Users\Mike Halsey\Music folder.

This will write a series of 0s, 1s and then random characters to every sector of the drive or folder to securely erase the data that’s stored there. Believe me, if you do this casually you’re not going to get your data back afterwards.

Microsoft say that this feature is here for clearing empty folders and drives that need to be erased, and it’s an excellent way to save money on expensive third-party software.

So the next time you’re upgrading your hard disk, don’t waste your money, just cipher the thing instead.

Used Hard Drives Still Haven For Identify Theft

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 15:02:17 +0000

Sellers are currently offering 3807 used hard drives on eBay.com alone. Add 5303 used desktop PCs, 975 Apple Desktops and thousands of other used devices like digital cameras or mobile phones that might contain data that has not been properly deleted by its previous owner. According to Techradar 66% of the used hard drives were not properly erased and contained personal data from the previous owner. It’s hard to pinpoint the validity of the number because the article fails to mention the amount of hard drives that have been tested.

The figure means that 66 used hard drives out of 100 sold would contain data data about the previous owner. Half of that number would still mean that every third used hard drive sold would contain personal data. The figures seem to grow worth instead of better with every passing year. Researchers seem to concentrate on hard drives but digital cameras or mobile phones might reveal the same amount of information including personal pictures, documents, contacts and even credit card or bank account information.

How can users protect themselves and their data? The easiest way would be to stop selling used hardware that contained data at one point. That solution is not always practicable though.

The user should make sure to make the data on the storage device unrecoverable. One of the best tools for that purpose is Eraser which can be used to clear the free disk space so that the files “underneath” cannot be recovered with file recovery software anymore.

Any tips that you might want to add? Let me know.