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Ask Slashdot: How To Clean Up My Work Computer Before I Leave?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm leaving my current job for a new one. I've been at this job for 10+ years so I'm sure there is tons of personal stuff stored on my machine. Since I can't take it with me does any one have a suggestions of tools or practices to clean off all of that data. I've already got my personal documents and files. I'm most worried about CC, debit card numbers and web site passwords I've used in browsers. Does clearing the cache, cookies, temp files do a good enough job? BTW it's a Windows 7 system if that makes a difference."
It's the only way to be sure.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Boot a Linux live-cd and type dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
Clear your browser including flash cookies and cache, clear temp folders, uninstall and wipe the folders of any chat apps you may have been using, and that's good enough unless you think they're going to use a file recovery app on your hard disk.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
http://www.dban.org/ Works wonders :)
Start shred'ing your files as soon as you know you're leaving - especially if your shit is being backed up...it keeps the file sizes the same, so they will propagate through any backups or archives.
Depend on your IT setup, but if an option, just ask your sysadmin to re-image it. Don't discount the obvious and direct route. It's a reasonable request, you have justification, and if you are on good terms with the IT department I'm sure they'll hook you up.
Deleting the account would remove most setting from browser, application, documents, internet history. Then I would check other folder not in the "My Documents" for instance C:\projects....
Boot it, Nuke it. http://www.dban.org/
For any company worth it's salt. They've been doing automated backups in the background for you. Anything you do, even wiping your drive will not take those backups away.
http://www.dban.org/
bleachbit.sourceforge.net/ ...
BleachBit quickly frees disk space and tirelessly guards your privacy. Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and
Bleach & fire.
Linux boot disk, use the security wipe tools there, or good ol'dd.
Main reason to use a boot disk is to avoid any windows based security that might prevent you from performing a true wipe.
Darik's Boot and Nuke?
In light of your concerns, and the clear potential for lingering personal data, would it be wrong to leave them with wiped bare metal? They could always re-install Win 7 (perhaps even from a recovery partition).
If you work for the NSA, that might not be good enough, but it should be for the majority of people.
Just talk to the SysAdmin and ask him to format and reinstall the machine.
I did the same thing at my previous workplace. Only difference : I was the only IT-guy, so I've done it myself.
Eraser for Windows is probably what you want. Though if you can't install anything, sdelete is probably more useful.
Why were you doing this kind of stuff at work?
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Who gives a flying fuck about anything else ...
Just DBAN it.
If you're on good terms with your IT dept and want to be polite, ask one of them if it's okay for you to do that.
Almost certainly whoever uses it next will want a clean install anyway. Or they may just dump it and your info will be in a used PC for sale on eBay in a couple of weeks.
1. burn post-it note on monitor.
2. rest assured.
Wipe the whole thing. Don't worry about causing problems for the next user of the machine, tech support would probably do a format-and-reinstall anyway just to be sure that it's back to company standards.
DBAN Also there are some software out there that overwrite only empty space resulting in not requiring to drop a new image, but getting rid of everything would seem the only safe course of action.
You poor bastard. They hadn't upgraded your machine in 10 years? No wonder your leaving.
Your company should have some sort of information security policy that requires drives to be zeroed out and then reimaged before being given to a new employee.
The quality of questions on slashdot lately is abysmal. You really need a slashdot answer to tell you to reinstall windows and reformat the drive in the process? or to nuke the drive with any easily-googable drive erasing tool and reinstall windows?
Easy. Start with not storing personal stuff on a work computer. Next step - assuming you're an admin on your box - create another admin account on the box. Log off your account, log in to that account, delete your profile off the box.
Why would your CC info be on the box, anyway? Do you really type out your CC number into text files and leave them on your PC? Why?
Really? Why? Whatever. Anyway, I thought it was standard practice to wipe and reimage any pc if it changes owners in a company. Anything else is frankly bizarre.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Remove or destroy your workstation's hard disk. If you feel they might object to this, replace it with a new one and re-image the machine. Next job: use Portable Apps http://portableapps.com/ from a thumb-drive, and you won't have to worry about it.
/dev/random
The best way is to replace the drive with a new one. You keep the drive. Do what you want with it, you may need it later.
Buy the exact model # to avoid issues.
The answer lies in how paranoid you are. Easiest solution to me is go find a liveCD or USB distro that lets you do a DoD wipe... Let it run... Return the laptop. The IT department will have a re-imaging process that they should be using anyway.
If you want to play around a little more, and if you have administrative privs on the laptop, I have a fun one. Enable BitLocker, but don't use the TPM if there's one present. Use a USB stick to store the keys and make the USB necessary to boot. Encrypt the disk. Then use dd from a liceCD to wipe the whole thing. It isn't as good as the DoD wipe, but it can be fun. It also gives you a little more time to poke around the drive to find anything else you might want to save.
D-Ban it.
Go ahead.. redundant.. but it should be repeated over and over.
Derek's boot and nuke. cleans up everything. the other thing that you shouldn't really ever do is store debit/credit card numbers in browser cache. it's almost like giving away your money. good luck!
You have been working with a machine(s) that you do not own for some number of years are you are just starting to worry about this now? In most offices, anyone can log on to any machine, probably remotely. There are probably backups of your stuff running around the infrastructure somewhere too. If anyone wanted your info, they already have it. I would simply ask that your machine be re-imaged before you go. If questioned, you want to be courteous to the next person to occupy your desk.
Use srm (secure remove). It will do 35 passes writing random data after deleting your files. It can take a while to run if you have lot of large files to delete.
Data sanitation is part of my job; usually you'll get the derp that'll say "only way to be sure is to destroy it", that's because they're ignorant.
Here is what you do:
1. Go get CCleaner, make sure that you set wipe mode to at least 1 wipe (this is all you need to permanently destroy anything... you do not need to do 7... or 35), and WIPE EVERYTHING; including flash cookies, temp files etc. Here is a factual study from a university that says so: http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml This will get rid of everything currently on your computer.
2. Go get Eraser, set it to wipe 1 time by "filling up" your disk. This will get everything you've ever deleted on the machine that wasn't properly erased.
That's it, you're done.
Well, no, not really. You don't want to set the building on fire and burn a hole down to the floor below.
I guess talk to your IT guy and see what their policy is. I work in a fairly small place but I feel confidentiality is important enough to make wipe-and-re-image SOP whenever a computer is pulled from a desk. It's a trivial operation and it saves a LOT of headaches down the line. Even though we run a domain, lots of security policies, regular updates, no local admin for end users, etc.. You still can't be sure exactly what is on a computer if you haven't personally used it for two years. No matter what sort of security policy, user policy, or automated software inventory you might be running it's not worth it to re-use an install and find some odd issue the next day.
If you don't have a good working relationship with your IT dept and you don't, just run DBAN (http://www.dban.org/) and give the machine a good security erase. If someone asks you questions just shrug and feign ignorance. "Dunno. Just won't boot man. It's my last day anyway! What luck, huh?"
Less secure, but you could boot a linux distro disk and use DD to wipe the first few MB of the hard drive with 0s. This will erase the partition table, and will effectively erase the drive for anyone who doesn't care to run a forensic recovery suite on the drive.
how this comment section has become a testimonial for DBAN.
Is your user an admin account? If so, I would create a local user as an Administrator, reboot, log on as the local administrator, then completely delete your user profile from: C:\Users\ProfileName - Of course, there is nothing to stop the IT guys from running recovery software to get these files back, but if you are on a domain (without roaming profiles) you can then log back on as your domain account. This will re-create your local profile based on the default machine profile and this will look exactly like a normal profile folder, only it will be completely empty, without any of your browsing history etc.
Again, they can use recovery software to try and get stuff back, and other than formatting a bunch of times, or running shredding software, or filling and emptying the drive a few times, there isn't much you can do about this... Other than maybe running the process I mentioned above and then running a ghost copy to a completely new drive and telling it to ignore whitespace...
It all depends on how far you want to go!
Zeb
Think of it like a spin cycle.
IT should be taking care of this for you. Don't try and do things yourself without consulting with IT first, I've seen many users mess things up when they try to take maters in their own hands. Remember, you're using company property, and all the data belongs to the company too. If you have personal data, let the IT person know this, and they will be responsible to dealing with it.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
You can if you tell them you had sensitive medical information stored on your PC...
Ummm...my math may be a bit off here but...
You can boot from a DBAN disc and 0 out the entire hard drive and say it randomly broke
or
Download the secure shredder application that normally comes with Spybot Search and Destroy. They do offer a separate download. Drag in anything sensitive and it overwrites it with garbage data. Then to clear off anything you may have deleted in the past without securely overwriting it, use CCleaner's "wipe free space" feature which by the way is turned off by default. Anything that's listed as available space on the hard drive is overwritten with 0's. You can also nuke your internet history and temp files first easily with CCleaner.
This is true, but my experience has been that deletion of off-site user backups are part of out-processing. We used Iron Mountain at my last job, and I had to manually remove data stores for every outgoing employee. Annoying as hell.
Delete your profile Control Panel->System->Advanced system settings->Advanced -> User Profiles -> Select and delete.
Forget about deleting personal things from backups
While it isn't the same as destroying the drive, this should be good enough, w/o inconviencing the systems team. Any 'work' ( documents / files / email ) you generated while using the computer for work is considered property of the company, so only focus on your personal stuff (so you dont get busted for 'destroying company property'.
- Open each browser (firefox, IE, chrome) and delete cache, cookies, etc...
- Move / delete all your files in My (Documents | Pictures | Videos | Music), and desktop
- Uninstall any programs you installed and wasn't for work
- Confirm no personal items stored in root "C:\"
- Delete everything in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp
- Delete everything in %SystemRoot%\TEMP
If you have admin perms
-After you have saved your work files off someplace else, create New admin User, log in as that admin, delete your old profile, and confirm that C:\Users\"OLD LOGIN NAME" does not exists
I wish my company was doing automated backups.
For any company worth it's salt. They've been doing automated backups in the background for you. Anything you do, even wiping your drive will not take those backups away.
My company doesn't back up any desktops - if it's not put on a fileserver drive, it's not backed up.
When I get a new box, I ghost the hard drive right after I get all the work stuff installed and setup. Upon leaving, simply reimage the drive and move along.
Backing up User machines? Not a chance. We back up our servers, and provide plenty of storage space on those servers for users to store important docs ... but the 2000+ user machines are on their own.
And as a former IT guy, we nuked and reinstalled every computer before it went to a new user. You don't want someone else potentially having access to your old files, and I don't want someone else having to inherit whatever problems have arisen on your PC over the last 10 years.
This signature is false.
If you have a semi-competent IT department it's backed up multiple times anyway.
NUKE THE SITE FROM ORBIT
I always have a concern about the "hit by a bus" item, and where I work, I rather have all my documentation available for someone replacing than accidently leave the fact that I am looking at trips on Saturdays to head to.
Browsing history? Easy fix. Plug in a drive, use sandboxie, and redirect it there. Then when having to leave, unplug drive and erase that. All the stuff needed on the workstation is still there, but private browsing stuff is well sequestered away.
DBAN. Enough said.
I make it my personal SOP when leaving any job to throw DBAN in the drive, let it run and then load a clean copy of the OS with the company licensed software. You could take it a step further and replace the hard drive but that's just a little paranoid don't ya think?
And in the future, never put any personal data on your work computer, ever. Never even type personal passwords on it. Don't shop on it. It's not your machine, you cannot control it, your employer has rights to every bit on it, and therefore from your personal data point of view it's hard to think of a less secure system.
Worked for Ray Gricar...
That is one of the best ways I've found to encourage reluctant users to store their files on a fileserver. Explicitly telling people that their workstation hard drives are considered expendable and interchangeable does quite a bit to overcome the "but it's MY computer" mindset that persists for some users (even the ones from after the time of nigh-omnipresent LANs). Also, moving workstations from desk to desk as part of "regular computer maintenance" will flush out the remaining laggards (that was one the best things I've ever seen a CIO think up.)
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Feynman
I just downloaded one of those DOD bootup CDs that wipes the drive, booted off it on my last day and then went around shaking hands and saying goodbye. It was still running when I left but realistically it doesn't matter.. one wipe of 0s and nobody can get anything off that disk.
Not that there's anything worthwhile on it anyway...
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Simply replace the hard drive with a similar one, install Windows 7 and other support applications (i.e. Office), and microwave the old drive.
If youre putting personal information on your work computer then you have already proven yourself to be a incredible fucking retard. Its a WORK computer at your companies office. Why in the hell you would be doing personal stuff on it to begin with is beyond me. You should know better than to be doing that, your personal stuff should be done on your personal equipment which you have 100% control over. You might as well just leave copies of all your personal information laying in a stack on your office desk.
Buy a smartphone, buy a tablet or something to do your personal stuff on at work but dont be dumb enough to do it on a computer that isnt even yours. Had you done that you wouldnt be worrying about this now.
Also, moving workstations from desk to desk as part of "regular computer maintenance" will flush out the remaining laggards (that was one the best things I've ever seen a CIO think up.)
As long as you manage to move any customizations the user has made to increase his productivity.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
A quick google provides links and instructions on how to use a live CD to wipe a drive.
Personally, I always install Truecrypt and lock the machine down first thing. Personal or professional computer doesn't matter, they're all fully encrypted. I have never worked in a place where the common practice was anything but to format and reinstall before handing a computer off to the next employee, so whether it's encrypted or not makes no difference in that regard. I've never had any trouble with IS because of it. Granted, I've never worked for a "big evil" corporation, so YMMV.
Backups should only be available to admins, who will have probably had full access to your data all the time you've been working there.
Wiping the disk will stop the next dumb user who is assigned your PC from seeing anything, even if they take the drive out and remount it somewhere.
But you can't stop the BOFH. What stops the BOFH is supposedly the possibility of being found out and then becoming unemployable.
To clean your "personal stuff" off of your work computer you should take a rag and some disinfectant and scrub real hard. But I doubt you'll be able to remove all the stuff. You shouldn't be watching porn at work anyway.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
you redistribute 10 year old pc's? you cheap bastards!
Why does everyone keep saying "DBAN!!! Nuke it! Tear the HDD out!" Yes you had personal data on your PC, but simply deleting this info or deleting your profile from the machine should be enough. Do you really think anyone cares enough to spend the time to try and recover your logins after you've done so? Nobody gives a shit.
He is most probably not in a position to do either one of those "solutions", so yes ask slashdot has really gone downhill. Criminal charges could be filed if he dban'd his computer without permission since it would be destruction of company property. You don't know what all is on it and he is asking to remove specific information from the computer which again sounds like he does not either want to or is specifically not allowed to dban his computer.
So what is a solution to his problem that is able to be done without admin privileges?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
At the company I work for, whenever we...
1. Get a new PC
2. Leave the company
we're required to do a wipe (and the tool is actually in the BIOS for easy access)
If you're worried, this is the best way to get it off your mind as well.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
The whole "DoD Wipe" thing is overkill.
One single pass of dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ will destroy all the data on the disk, beyond any hope of recovery.
If it's Windows, you should be able to boot any Linux distro off a thumb drive and chew up any directories you'd like.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
A strong magnet on the drive should do the trick. Just stick it on the last day and your good.
1. Will the corporate IT staff (or your former boss/co-workers etc.) rifle through your drive lookinfg for stuff? If so, a DOD wipe is the only useful alternative, though if you fee strongly enough about this, damaging the hard drive beyond recovery isi the ultimate option. And will annoy the heck out of them, and burn a bridge.
2. Failing that, if you're confident your IT staff will not peruse the drive, but a wipe is out of question, consider cleaning out the files, emptying temp files and histories, and then a few defrags to most throughly move files over and over. Maybe try creating a huge structure of dummy files out to the limits of defrag (20% or so free), let it try twice, and watch it write to virtually every sector trying to optimize. Then delete the dummies and defrag again. Poor man's obfuscation. Marginally effective.
3. After this, not much else is useful IMHO. If you trust your employer and staff at all, ask them if you can do a wipe. I would lobby my employer for that option if I were in their shoes. I don't *want* your data. I want a clean machine if I'm redeploying it, and I'll destroy the drive instead of selling off.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Ignore everyone telling you about the various forensic techniques that can recover your data - Unless you have recently gotten the company sued, they will make a final-state backup of your current files (no special scans for even the easiest of recoverable crap), maybe wipe it, and redeploy it to New Guy "just until they can get him a new one (in five years or so)".
As your realistic biggest concern, you want to make sure the last X backups have nothing interesting in them. So do a normal cleaning of your system, delete all your old mail, delete all your internet shortcuts (and history and cookies and offline files), delete just about everything in your Documents folder, clean up your desktop, empty the recycle bin, run SpyBot's Usage Tracks cleanup, CClean your registry, and then... Do nothing even remotely interesting for your last few weeks. If you have local admin, in your last hour at work, log in as admin, delete your profile, and defragment your drive(s), but you really don't need to go that far.
The most paranoid I'd personally bother with (and I definitely wear a tinfoil hat when it comes to "my" files on a work computer - I keep them all in a truecrypt archive from day 1), you could boot to Knoppix and run a "dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda". Keep in mind that although that will overwrite everything on the disk, it will also definitely get IT's attention. And honestly, you have the best chance of vanishing quietly into obscurity at that company by not doing anything IT finds all that interesting (see my comment on backups - You can bet that if they get interested enough, they'll find a two year old backup that somehow escaped the regular rotation).
Once you do the delete, use "cipher /w C:" to securely wipe all of the empty space.
The company I work for has a policy that you wipe with your drive before turning it in for re-image. PDWipe is the recommended tool.
I work in an environment where re-imaging and deleting is not an option. Often my work actually images an employees computer for backup purposes when they leave the company, in case any work specific files are left lying around.
I think the question here is, how can you nuke as much "private" stuff as possible, keeping the OS and possibly work files intact.
-Benjamin J. Judson
(I don't have a witty sig)
Follow these instructions, mainly the ones that say, "For the truly paranoid"
http://tinyapps.org/docs/wipe_drives_hdparm.html
C:\Documents and Settings\Ricky\My Documents\faxes\sent faxes
A wipe requires pulling the drive (pita) or it requires having a boot disk with tools (which isn't always handy if you're being let go and don't have 24 hours to run a 3x wipe).
My preferred method is to leave the drive encrypted at all times with my own key. Then a format with a ubuntu boot disk gives me peace of mind. or deleting the data partition is fine. Worst case, returning the laptop completely intact is still going to require them to wipe it, but you still have to wonder if you might be compelled to provide the passphrase, albeit it may be unlikely as you don't work there anymore.
Now as for the online backups that your company has been making of your drive, that's a different story. You should have had an encrypted virtual drive for that stuff all along.
Why not just buy a new hard drive and stick in there? Then you can nuke the old hard drive and not worry about it?
21st Century Renaissance Man
First off I'll say for "next time", don't store personal information on company gear. Anything you've ever put on there is arguably company property. Any backups they've ever mare are also theirs. You shouldn't be in this situation to begin with. But that's not relevant to you now, you want a solution to the spot you're already in so I'll get to that next. Just try to avoid a reoccurrence next time huh?
Any company IT person with a clue will make sure your machine gets wiped and reimaged when you leave anyway. Even the remote possibility of an employee leaving a back door, logic bomb, or incriminating data (kiddy porn, descriptions of corporate illegal activity, made up stuff that could be bad, etc) being on your computer after you leave pretty much makes a nuke of your machine mandatory. So get the go-ahead from your IT person and then do it yourself. You may need to unlicense / deactivate some pro software on there first, make sure you have that taken care of first. Then do a secure wipe using whatever method you're comfortable with. Ask your IT person if you don't know how. It's a process that will take hours to run. If it finishes in under a few minutes, it didn't wipe anything, it merely reset the directory records, and your data is still on the drive.
The most basic mode of any secure wipe is good enough for anything short of DoD-class erasing. In reality, a simple one-pass zero of a drive will prevent anyone with a budget under $50k from getting anything off your drive. No need to go nuts with a seven pass random wipe, it'll just be a waste of your time with no added benefit.
After you've secure-erased it, let them do the reinstallation. That's how it should work, there's no point in wiping it only to give you another crack at installing a back door just before you walk out. If they say no that's ok you can do it, remember this... you are opening yourself to future suspicion because if something shady happens when your replacement has been using the machine, you are a suspect. ("hmmm that shouldn't have happened, how did that get out? I wonder if Jim didn't leave a back door?") Don't take that risk. Leave it blank. Nothing can be attributed to you after they do a fresh installation themselves. If they push you to do the reinstall yourself, push back with this point, you're not refusing to do it to be a dick, you're covering your ass. They should respect that. And explain how this also covers THEIR ass. That should be very difficult to say "no" to. If they still insist on your doing the reinstall before leaving, get it in writing. That will help you later if a wild criminal investigation appears later.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Make an ISO of your hard drive when you first start the job.. Then just restore that ISO when you leave..
Many companies already have ISOs pre-created for their machines.
"... I'm most worried about porn, CC, porn,debit card numbers and porn site passwords I've used in browsers."
FTFY
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
If you have 10 years worth of stuff on a Win 7 box maybe your company is using roaming profiles and you've just been upgraded over the years. In which case, you're too late. They already have a copy of your profile on their servers and probably a decent number of backups.
It's been said here already, but it is a company computer and they have rights to all information on it. It was probably in the IT policy that you signed when you started. But that policy should cover the IT department as well and prevent them from using your personal data maliciously. Has your IT staff given you reason to fear them?
Supplies!
I find it incredible that you have had the same machine for 10 years...
As long as you manage to move any customizations the user has made to increase his productivity.
We had a hot desk policy for a while - "all desks are hot desks, first come first served". We had to abandon it when it became obvious that users have different needs - right down to raising desk height for taller users. I choose to use a natural keyboard, not because I need to particularly, but mainly to stop other people using my desk when I'm not in - it's amazing how much trouble most people have typing on it!
OK, I know software customisation is different and most should be done on the network - roaming profiles and so on. Not always possible though, and most users also use their work PC as a temporary filestore - yes, stuff that needs backing up should be on the network, but sometimes you need to mess about with large files temporarily and using local storage is easier to avoid pissing off your network and/or storage teams!
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
DOD standard is to use Gdisk. I work for the government and it works really good.
"Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk."
~Joaquin Setanti
I realize you want to protect your own personal data (which shouldn't have been on the computer in the first place), but what about the company's own files?
I presume that some time during your 10+ years there, you did some actual work. Did you create and save work files on to the computer? emails that might be important? budgets? graphics? proposals? quotes? vendor data?
While a good portion of that might be on a server, there are probably files that your company will want which aren't, and they belong to the company.
Often when an employee leaves, IT will image their entire machine onto a DVD in case they need to go looking for specific files (business, not personal). By formatting your machine you are preventing them from doing this. This might come back to bite you if you ever want a positive referral from your employer, or to return as an employee again.
The whole "DoD Wipe" thing is overkill.
The whole "DoD Wipe" thing is also a myth.
I believe the Win7 has the option to encrypt your home directory? /users/X homedir) should be enough for most cases, and it leaves the machine usable for anyone else.
If that's on, then nuking the user account (and associated
Of course, if you're on AD with roaming profiles then nuking the local machine does little for the data that's on the network.
I was going to say "myth", too. Have you noticed how the only people that insist that a "DoD wipe" is essential for getting rid of old data on drives are the people selling expensive drive-wiping software?
Ask your employer if you can buy/keep the machine, on the basis that their IT administrator verifies the disk has been securely wiped.
It's called efficiency, you wasteful clod!
Actually, no. We're on a strict 3-year refresh policy for warranty reasons. The 10-year reference was from the original question.
This signature is false.
This is why the last few jobs I've had I straight out asked. Do you have an issue with me using my personal PC? Granted I am in the IT industry and if I used a work machine I would have set it up and admin it myself but why? Also my personal machine is 100x better then anything they would give me.
Company stuff stored on the SAN like everyone else's profile and all personal stuff remains on my machine. Soooo glad I did this with my last "job", really they were a client and I was a contractor but splitting hairs. 1 day they said they didn't need me any more and I said no problem, good bye. I have my laptop with me and any data that was theirs is still there. The kicker was saved passwords are on my machine. They haven't paid my last invoice and now asking for passwords, not my problem. Pay the invoice, get the passwords. Otherwise should have thought that through before e-mailing and saying you didn't need me anymore.
Now the sys admin for a fairly large company and several people have asked about using their personal machines. Put a policy in place that it's no problem but company data is stored on the SAN and I don't support their computer issues unless it's completely work related. Network is locked down enough for it not to be a real problem anyways.
Boot linux off removable media and then run the following command:
for i in 1 2 3 4 5 \
do \
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda \
done
If your site is using a cloud app these days, as long as the machine can run Chrome, it's still good.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
When I walked out the door of a company last time, I booted the computer to a DBAN disk while I was clearing off my desk, and walked out, left a note on the computer for the IT guys 'Please re-image'
And that was that.
My last week there I told my boss my hard drive crashed, so I got a new one, installed it and personally threw out the old drive.
Something to remember is that if you actually wipe it - they'll know you've wiped it.
So it depends upon why you are trying to wipe the PC, if you are just worried about personal data getting into someone elses hands - I'd talk to the IT guys and find out what they do.
If they re-image the PC, you are probably ok if you remove the files you are worried about, and run something like bleachbit which will remove all of the temp files, reset all of your web browsers, and overwrite the free space left on disk.
If you are worried about the company finding evidence of something and retaining your severance/pension/options/something and you want to _completely_ wipe the drive the only solution is DBAN. But they'll know you've done this - as there will be NOTHING left on the drive.
As ALWAYS with this kind of thing its a tradeoff between the risks you are trying to protect against and any risks you might take to do that.
So if you can't/don't want to wipe it with dban, I'd recommend deleting any files you don't want retained, turn off system restore - wipe any recovery points, then download and run bleachbit or something else which cleans up your PC and WIPES all free space on disk.
Alex
Also, moving workstations from desk to desk as part of "regular computer maintenance" will flush out the remaining laggards (that was one the best things I've ever seen a CIO think up.)
Hopefully this includes the use of roaming profiles – if not, you're going to lose a lot of productivity as employees waste time setting up things the way they want them on a bunch of different computers.
Dunno about DoD, but DoJ hits drives with a degausser then runs them through a crusher that turns them into 1/8" confetti. Have fun reconstructing THOSE files.
Posting your Make and exact Model may prompt us for more suggestions.
If re-installing is Not an option.
Back up data you want to save, then follow the exact order below.
1. Create a new admin user account.
2. Log into that new account and delete any other user accounts (do not delete the hidden admin or guest accounts)
3. Uninstall any software you don't want to pass on. then search the hard drive for those names of software and remove any folders left behind.
4. Delete any folders on the C drive that may have been created manually by the user.
5. Do a IE7-8 reset, then delete browsing history (select all the boxes)
6. Use index.dat suite to delete any .dat files it finds,(requires selecting them to be deleted on a reboot) http://support.it-mate.co.uk/?mode=Products&p=index.datsuite
See this link for instructions using index.dat suite on Vista or W7 http://support.it-mate.co.uk/?mode=Products&act=FAQ&p=index.datsuite#193
Or use a linux live disc to delete all the .dat files.
7. At the command prompt type these 3 commands one at a time hitting enter each time, the erase tmp command may take time to complete.
cd\
erase *.tmp /s
erase *.bak /s
8 . Empty the Recycle Bin
9 . Use eraser version 5.8.8 to erase the free space on the hard drive, install eraser, then right click on the C drive and select "erase unused space". (it may take quite some time if the hard drive is large) http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/files/
Boot with a Linux live cd/dvd/usb drive and erase the drive. If you just want to erase it, then use this command:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
That will write null (zero) bytes to every sector on the disc. If you want it to be forensically erased, then you will need to run dd several times, overwriting the disc with different bit patterns. The company will have to re-image the drive, re-installing the operating system and applications, but they won't be able to access any of your personal data.
This will delete all your browser information (site preferences, form data, passwords, history, etc) and lots more.
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner
For regular use you'll probably want it on default settings.
It takes 15 seconds and can be quite therapeutic.
you redistribute 10 year old pc's? you cheap bastards!
I'm still using an 8 year old P4 3Ghz machine as my primary desktop at work. I salvaged it myself after we needed to deploy my much newer machine to someone else.
I run linux on it and primarily use it for web browsing and to remote desktop to a Win7 Virtual machine where I can run Outloook and MS-Office for compatibility with the rest of the office.
The CPU speed is fine, but I wish I could put more than 2GB of RAM in it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shred_(Unix)
That's nice, but other companies are not your company. We managed to pull it off on the 19,000+ user machines we supported. Yes, it was an administration nightmare, never worked correctly, and managed to cause more trouble than it fixed (backup data store exceeded quota? no login for you!), but such is the case with most corporate security policies.
It was also policy to perform a DoD wipe and reload of any user PCs/laptops as part of out-processing.
It's a great idea, but check with your company's policies first. Arguably, whatever data is on that machine belongs to them. You may be destroying their property.
In most companies, wiping the machine won't get you into any trouble. But if you are a contractor for say, a Government contractor, you could be getting yourself in hot water. My advice is, yes, wipe it if you can. But, be sure it's not going to land you in any hot water first.
That being said... an IT guy at my last job (small company) let me take home a computer that was being replaced. It was a coworker's old desktop and hadn't been wiped. I went ahead and wiped it, but I'm sure that's not always the case.
CCleaner is a nice easy way to clean up temp files/cookies/history/passwords from a variety of applications.
Then in the tools section use the drive wipe on free space with whatever number of overwrites makes you comfortable.
keep any personal files in a truecrypt file volume, dismount it whenever not in use
Install Linux. You'll be doing yourself and your (former) company a great service.
CAPTCHA = peering (say what!?)
cheers
If you do a complete whipe, you may leave your successor and those you leave behind without the ability of answering questions down the road related to your work.
Additonally, and more importantly - there may be legal reasons why you cannot delete your information.
Share your conserns with the guy who's likely to be doing the work. If he lets you bootNnuke, great. if you need to run through manually:
1. Delete your browsing history and records from each browser you have on your computer, Start with IE. if you can, reset all settings. that should do the trick for any remembered websites.
2. Do a once over on Documents/Desktop/Favorites for any personal notes you may have.
3. Ensure that you have nothing stored outside of your profile. (C:\Users\You)
4. %TEMP%, DELETE ALL THAT STUFF, i cannot stress that one enough.
We all do personal stuff on a work computer. I'm guilty as hell of this.
But the Jr. Admin who's likely to be shelving your computer and re-imaging it in a month is likely not to care about your stuff. Expecally if you thank his dept about a week before departure, think pizza, or Subs.
regards. A windows Admin
Why on earth would you put information that is personal and has nothing to do with the performance of your job on company property? It makes that information effectively company property. If our employees just absolutely must do their Amazon.com shopping while they're at work (and effectively doing their job), they're permitted to bring in their own equipment and use the guest network.
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
Backup all work-related files onto a USB drive. DBAN. Install OS. Copy back the work files.
Boot to a windows repair disc from Windows Vista or newer /fs:NTFS /p:2
Go to command prompt
format c:
replace c: with whichever drives you want to sink
Writes all 0s to the drive twice.
Call up your It department and tell them you got a bluescreen and now it wont boot
make sure not to leave the repair disc in the drive.
Data is still recoverable if the NSA is after you or something but I doubt you care about that level of security.
DoD wipe hasn't been necessary for years (I seriously doubt it ever was). A single pass will prevent *anyone* from reconstructing the data.
They couldn't retrieve anything from the 18.5 minutes blank on the Nixon tapes, and that was analog media from the '70s. Data is way more dense today, especially on PMR drives. Delete the personal files, and use cipher to wipe free space.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_remanence#Feasibility_of_recovering_overwritten_data
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Simple. Ask to purchase your work computer when you leave. Not at the original purchase price, of course, but the value it is now. It might be worth the $300 or so for the CPU just for peace of mind. Or for that matter, just buy the hard drive. I'm sure they can work something out...
delete your personal stuff.
defrag the drive.
Install CC cleaner and tell it to secure wipe free space.
All done.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you can't use DBAN (Darik's Boot And Nuke) [www.dban.org] to wipe the hard drive, then try:
CCleaner [http://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER]: Use this to wipe browser info, temp files, etc. etc plus a whole lot more.
WSCC (Windows System Control Center) [http://www.kls-soft.com/wscc/]: This program allows you to download and use these utility suites: Windows Sysinternals Suite (including support for Sysinternals Live service) & NirSoft Utilities
Download both suites and use the password utilities to look at (and remove) your browser stored passwords.
'Everything' [http://www.voidtools.com/download.php]: This program creates a live list of _every_ file on your computer that you can instantly search through
[for example, to find all PDF files on your computer, type '*.pdf' and it'll be done searching as soon as you type the 'f'] (I've used it to search millions of files on a server).
'Spacemonger' [http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/]: This program visually shows all files on a drive, allowing you to see the big, buried files and where they're stored.
If your company uses centralized storage and your profile and home directories are stored out on a SAN, then there isn't much you can do. Your data has, in an ideal world, been backed up nightly and sent offsite.
They're going to wipe the hard disk anyway, but you're already hosed. Most of the time, they keep a rolling backup going back several weeks. Once you turn in your notice, they freeze those backups so the data can be examined later.
What you want to do is have your PC "crash" about a month before you turn in your notice, and get your IT department to re-image it. Then, don't do ANYTHING personal on it.
It's helpful if you can find out how long that rolling window is, btw.
Anyway, once you're satisfied that your prior image backups have rolled out (and that they don't do a "contribute" backup, where everything is saved forever, even if you delete it), then you can safely turn in your notice.
Problem with using your work PC for personal stuff is that they can use that as a basis upon which to fire you when you turn in your notice, and deny any benefits to which you might otherwise be entitled (pensions, etc).
How about you install cygwin, then do this:
cd ~
find . -type f -exec shred {} \;
Hopefully, that gets the "application data" directory and other hidden directories.
If you really want to toast everything, run a Linux live CD and shred the disk device.
Yup. The only DoD approved "wipe" is secure transport to location where the entire drive is extruded through a tiny hole.
As the computer is not yours, you CANNOT legally use DBAN, a Linux disc to run dd, or any other suggested method of destroying the usability of the computer. You can however delete YOUR profile folder, where all of the things you are concerned about removing reside.
As someone who has reimaged PC's at work, your privacy concerns should not come at the expense of your employer, especially since you willingly used your employer's computer to create these privacy concerns. If you didn't use your work equipment for personal business, then the 20 minutes that it takes to reimage the machine could be spent doing something more important.
Simple solution, I NEVER use my office computer for any of my personal stuff. No banking, never put in one of my credit card numbers, never bought anything on ebay, etc. Even if I could wipe the disk on my computer, what about any snooping over the network from the server farm and network filewalls keeping a copy of key strokes etc.....
If you aren't Admin, boot a live CD/DVD of the Linux or PE persuasion, delete your profile, and say nothing about it.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I assume you use Windows.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/
"Eraser is a secure data removal tool for Windows. It completely removes sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns."
It's up to you to uninstall unneeded applications and remove files you know contain personal data before leaving.
If you have administrative rights try creating a new username, deleting your old account, then deleting the Windows Profile for that account. Then run "eraser" in the "scrub the empty space on the disk" mode.
Does anyone know if forensics has ever recovered data from an overwritten hard drive?
SOMEONE knows, but he's not allowed to talk about it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Something to remember is that if you actually wipe it - they'll know you've wiped it."
Not necessarily. All they'll "know" is the machine won't boot and they won't see any partitions.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Like most of the IT staff on here have pointed out. DBANing your entire system is not suggested as is it almost certainly a breach of the computer use agreement with your company to do so (or it should be). What you need to something more targeted to be be sure that the information you have cleared via the standard methods cant be accessed. To do this I suggest the open source project Eraser http://eraser.heidi.ie/. With it you can get a level of protection above simply deleting the files and caches. It will preform a similar process to what DBAN will do to your entire drive but only for the unused spaces on the disk. The makes the files delete unrecoverable using standard recovery methods and still leaves the drive functional after its been used.
1) Dban, :)
2) dissassemble you PC
3) hit your hd with hammer (but leave no trace ie cardboard between hammer and hd)
4) reassemble it
5) go for a coffee
If you work for an organization that has it's act together a wipe is a waste of time. All your stuff is on the company backup especially the all important user data. There was probably some sort of terms of usage document you were shown or training you took that warned you about keeping personal stuff on your seat. If it's a big company that is staying on top of compliance stuff then the backup is in more than one place. Just go quietly and don't make a fuss that might make someone want to look at your stuff. Credit Card numbers and such are not really that much more at risk than they are at the vendors you gave them to electronically. Passwords can be changed. If you have been stupid enough to be visiting sites that were forbidden by your company or just plain common sense then...well... myself and every other professional sysadmin out here wishes you a hearty FOAD.
Exactly. Work computer is for work stuff. Personal stuff stays on your personal machine. Don't cross the streams. It's that simple. This really isn't rocket surgery.
I don't know if you've checked your employer's IT usage policy, but in general if it's a company computer, everything on it is company property. About the best you can do (assuming this isn't a "middle finger exit") is to talk with the IT folks and see if they'll be so kind as to wipe the disk after they've saved whatever work-related stuff they deem important. Most likely they don't give a hoot about anything NSFW (They can't fire you--you're leaving anyway) and they'll want to make sure it's gone because exposing other employees to it would be a liability for them. If it's a typical usage policy, they could indeed withold your last paycheck or even sue you for wiping the disk yourself ("destruction of company data") or for that matter for copying anything non-personal and taking it with you ("stealing company information" or "breaching security"). If you were dumb enough to store any personal passwords or sensitive personal information on it....well, it sucks to be you.
Where is that spam when we need it?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
When you start using the machine 10 years ago, make sure all your personaly stuff is in a separate partition/directory so that it's easily detachable from the stuff owned by the company. Delete that directory before leaving, letting them keep everything they own because it's work product from a work for hire agreement (explicit or otherwise). Leave with them happy and with you happy.
Just buy the pc or change the hard drive. Hard drives are cheap enough.
Transfer the windows license, basic setup and you are done.
Barring some situation where you've got incriminating stuff on the drive, your best approach to this problem is just to be honest. Approach the IT department and state the following case:
-I've been here for ten years. While I didn't squander my time on personal crap, there's bound to be a personal email or credit card number somewhere in a browser cache or temp file.
-I've got (X instant message/skype/whatever) account running on login, and I don't want to leave that hanging around.
-What can we do to protect both myself and the company?
Suggest a drive wipe and reimage. It's a bit overkill, so if that's an issue suggest you be given supervised admin privileges to wipe temp folders, uninstall software, wipe leftover program and document folders, delete your old user account, etc. Ask about a place to back up all your work files in case anyone needs them.
Of course, your IT might not be retarded, but it doesn't hurt to ask. And if you've got admin privileges, do all that stuff yourself.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
So many /.ers, so little clue. If you don't want to nuke your install, first delete the files you want to get rid of and then use "cipher /W:C:\" (replace C:\ with whichever drive you want to clean) to overwrite all free space. It'll take overnight on a largish disk, so budget your time accordingly.
Indeed. I've often wondered where that started.
I wouldn't fret about your personal data. If your company's IT department wanted to steal your data they would have done it by now, assuming they have root access to your machine. For that matter, if you leave the machine at work at night any of your coworkers could have stolen it. That said, here's what I'd do:
1. Download and install CCleaner.
2. Configure it to delete all files associated with web browsers, flash, Java, PDF readers, etc. in addition to its defaults.
3. Configure it to write zero bytes over the files it deletes.
4. Run it and let it do its magic.
5. Uninstall any personal apps you've installed, including non-IE browsers, Java, PDF readers, etc. Instruct uninstallers to delete user profiles and personal data.
6. Run CCleaner again. This time run its registry cleanup tool as well.
7a. If you have access to the Administrator account, log out of your user account then log in as Administrator and delete your user account along w/ all its data,
7b If you don't have access to the Administrator account but your user account has Admin access, create a new account with Admin access, then log out of your user account, log into the new account, and delete your original account along w/ all its data.
That's pretty much it.
take the hard drive home with you after replacing it with a same capacity blank one? Let the techs deal with the reinstallation. Then again you might end up in jail for stealing awesomely valuable top secret company information. Ask if this is something you would be allowed to do, citing clear and sensible reasons for doing so.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Thermite
Reading all these comments about DBAN and wiping and everything is just paranoia. If the company is any sort of competence in any way, all of your web history is already been parsed at the proxy, all of your emails have gone through mail filters, and your network traffic has been snorted and sniffed by IDS/IPS systems.
If you don't want the next guy seeing your stuff, or they do backups of your PC, here is all you have to do in the two scenarios that might occur.
In both scenarios, do the following days and weeks before you leave. Let your team/boss know so they can use files from that location if you are doing a "knowledge transfer":
1) Move all of the files you want to a personal thumb drive or some other media. This means you are moving all the files in your my documents, and desktop or where ever else you stash files to the thumb drive. Be thorough not to leave anything behind.
2) Copy all work information to a shared drive (Team drive, personal home folder on the network, etc.). Again be thorough and find all the crevasses of your computer.
3) Continue to use your flash drive for all personal stuff instead of storing it on the local hard drive and bring it home every day.
If you have local admin rights, then do the following on your last day:
1) Create a new local admin user on the system at like 2pm before you leave that last day (assuming you leave at 5pm).
2) Login as that user, and remove the profile of your account by right clicking on "my computer" and selecting "properties", "advanced system properties", "advanced", "user profiles", and selecting your account - and "delete".
3) Defrag the hard drive by opening up "my computer", right clicking on c:\ drive and selecting "properties", selecting "tools", and clicking defrag now.
4) Get some coffee. When you are done, log out and leave.
If you don't have local admin access do the following: /s /f /q /a:h /a:s /a:r c:\users\"username"\appdata\* /s /f /q /a:h /a:s /a:r c:\users\"username"\appdata\*.* /s /f /q /a:h /a:s /a:r c:\windows\temp\* /s /f /q /a:h /a:s /a:r c:\windows\temp\*.*
1) Validate the path to your files. For example your "documents" directory should be something like c:\users\"username"\documents. Validate the "username" piece of it and use that in step 4.
2) Close all programs and make sure that your computer does not startup programs by default (ie. starting up outlook, mozilla, etc.) reboot the computer.
3) Login as yourself and do not start any programs. Just go start --> run --> and cmd.exe.
4) From the root directory run the following four commands. Replace "username" with your username.
del
del
del
del
5) At this point you have cleared off all the temp data, cookies, all personal files, all work files, and your computer looks like it is intact, which won't get cyber or the desktop team looking closer at what you did (like command history).
Yes there are more paranoid ways of cleaning everything off, but it is a work machine, and they have a right to what you produced, and already know where you were going and doing based on the corporate network software. This just will protect you a little.
Good luck on your future endeavors.
Seriously do it.
I work for a Large Corporation. I am completely unconcerned about data loss. The company is leasing these computers, and is also paranoid about losing "confidential datat" (they are most worried about access mechanisms for dbs that contain personal information of employees or customers, its massive lawsuit fodder). Consequently, my laptop (the only computer i have anything that qualifies as personal on) has an encrypted hard drive. Policy is that it gets wiped at the end of my use, and encrypted for another user if it is recycled, wiped if not. The IT guys take it pretty seriously - again, not because of my personal data, but because of fears of company-held data that could create a liability if they leaked.
I am not in possession of any such data, but, LargeCorp's paranoia doesn't care, and sees the wiping of all data on all computers as their own "Nuke it from orbit" protection from lawsuits. I and my data are trivial in comparison. They already know everything they care to about me.
Exactly. I spent three years as the sysadmin for a high school, and with 450 computers, I was not about to get out the Norton Spring Cleaning CD and start tinkering with the registry to delete HotBar/WeatherBug/whatever other crapware teachers managed to load.
I got a lot of it, and teachers even went to the principal, who sided with them, due to their superior knowledge of IT. "This is MY computer, and you will diagnose and fix the problem. You will not image it, since I'd lose everything!". I was once told that network home directories were like Nazi Germany.
Did I mention that I don't work there anymore?
Have you seen 'Office Space'? It's the answer to your question.
we modified our IT rules to state that wiping a hard drive without authorization is not allowed. Willful destruction of company property could cost you your last 2 weeks pay.
The real question is why does every IDIOT think it is a good idea to keep personal information on a company computer. Pictures of kids, tax returns, recipies, emails to people they are cheating on their partners, etc.
The DOD wipe is only overkill if you don't work for the DOD
stick the drive into a linux box and: /dev/sdb before proceeding)
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb bs=512
(obviously, make sure the drive in question is listed as
this is probably the most boring sig in the world
you can trust your employer not to be a total dick ;)
Ask IT if you can buy the machine. Problem solved.
CCleaner (Crap Cleaner)
Set it to remove everything even wipe free space, and set it to over write x3. That will take care of any "hidden" temporary data.
If I ever get filthy rich, I'm doing a large scale PSA on this because people are dumb and just don't get it.
Anything done on company property, that includes their computers and networks, is not private and should be considered like one is broadcasting their private information loudly for everyone to hear. Just because it's personal and/or done on non-company time doesn't mean it's private when on company property.
Never have your web browser save any information, especially passwords and sensitive information! I know it makes life easier, but just don't. If one is having a hard time remembering that stuff, use KeePass and make sure to use a password, not a windows account, and make a few backups.
If one absolutely must do private stuff while at work, use a smartphone, tablet, or a laptop. If that's not an option, there's plenty of ways to remote into one's computer at home. I personally use RDP over an SSH tunnel since it doesn't require installing any software, PuTTY is easily downloadable, and the RDP client is installed by Windows by default. I know I could just do RDP strait, but I like the added security SSH adds. I know there are some routers that will do the SSH tunneling natively (most SOHO on stock firmware can't) or you can just build your own with something like pfSense.
When I first started my current job (7 years ago) I was setting up the voice mail and noticed that there were already messages in the voice mail. Out of curiosity I listed to them thinking that if they were important I could forward them to someone who could help. What I found was astounding. It was a womans voice and the message she left was very explicit. I went and asked the IT department who had owned that voicemail before I started and it was some guy that quite a few years before. Anyways I deleted the messages, but I still remember that it was funny.
I agree with previous posters that you really need to keep your personal stuff on personal computers, I remote desktop into my home computer to do personal stuff (buying things, facebook, ebay, etc) so that my work computer does not have a trail.
and then
'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4096'
(if you only have one disk in the machine.)
That's nice, but other companies are not your company. We managed to pull it off on the 19,000+ user machines we supported.
Hmm...
Yes, it was an administration nightmare, never worked correctly, and managed to cause more trouble than it fixed (backup data store exceeded quota? no login for you!), but such is the case with most corporate security policies.
It was also policy to perform a DoD wipe and reload of any user PCs/laptops as part of out-processing.
You have a different definition of "pull it off" than most people. Sounds like you were able to present the illusion of it working, without it actually working reliably. Which is probably why many IT shops just force users to store data onto file shares and treat the data on the PC as disposable.
As many people already pointed out, anything you wanted to hide is already on the network. Anything you accessed over the Internet could be recorded - even if it was over TLS/SSL (that is, https). How? They own the network and can implement a man-in-the-middle attack that would be invisible to you. Additionally, they probably have sniffers sitting on all LAN segments anyway (called Intrusion Detection Systems - IDS).
Your Windows computer is part of a domain - this means every Domain Administrator account has full access to every bit on your machine, and has done for the entire time you were working there. You cannot lock them out in any way - even if you change permissions on files, they can change them back.
Many companies silently install monitoring software that not only records every keystroke, but takes a snapshot of your screen periodically.
Obviously, any mail you send or receive, any IM, etc, can be archived without you knowing, and any file you store on the LAN is probably backed up; it's possible even your desktop is.
If they want it, they can get it. So the only thing you can prevent is for the admin who takes possession of your abandoned machine from casually snooping around on it before she re-images it. For that, all you really need to do it delete you files and clear your cache.
The one exception is if you work from home using your own broadband. If that is the case, you should wipe it before you ship it back, as detailed above.
A good Admin will lock you out of this idea.
Don't put private information on your work machine. It's (in most work places) against policies to begin with, but even if not your personal information is now in official archival backups (assuming your organization is remotely competent).
Wow, frequently moving people from machine to machine? Really? Are you that stupid? Perhaps for the rank and file secretary it's not a huge issue, but for an moderate or advanced user? It takes me days or weeks to get a clean re imaging back to a fully operational advanced developer state (usually because there are important but rarely used programs I miss when doing so).
I'm amazed you haven't been lynched yet...
Again, there's a pointless waste of effort. Zero out the drive, and *nothing* is coming back.
For those seriously suggesting dd, and assuming leaving the computer inoperable and none of the data is critical, how about instead doing: /dev/sdx /dev/sdx
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass xxxxxxxx
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-erase xxxxxxxx
This is rated as the highest security erase short of physically destroying the hard-drive. It will wipe all areas of the hard-drive, including relocated and spare blocks and such, unlike dd. And most importantly, it'll do it FAST. It will do only single pass erase however; Bradley Manning's chatlogs linking him to Wikileaks were reputedly recovered from a single overwrite wipe. If you require this level of security, then you shouldn't even need to ask, nuking it from the orbit is the only way to be sure.
However, I'm personally going to go with the people who note that as it's a work computer that's property of the workplace, rendering it inoperable and/or deleting work-related data on it are probably not approved use. And if the workplace/employee had any sense, all of the data on the computer are already backed up or even initially located on company fileservers, after which it is really anyone's guess who all have access to the super-seekrit stuff on it. In the best case all the work related data is backed up or on company servers and the private data exists only on the workstation, in which case the Security Erase methods is valid, but the odds of this distinction having held are slim at best.
The explaination can be found here: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
under "Further Epilogue". I didn't post it because it would be a wall of text.
My company created a policy last year prohibiting exiting employees from nuking their PCs or re-imaging them. Seems a few people totally erased the HDs on a few laptops and destroyed evidence which may of proved they were committing industrial espionage, and like all good corporate knee jerk reactions they immediately put a draconian policy in place stating that they could and would withhold things like severance pay if they found out you did this upon leaving. The dudes that NEEDED to do it will still do it anyway and the chumps like me and the OP that just want to assure our privacy are on the butt end of the cruel joke.
My solution is that I made a rather large Truecrypt (TC) volume and mount it just after booting, I placed the Truecrypt executables (NOT installed by an EXE or MSI just unzipped) buried in the default path somewhere so they would be executable from anywhere with a batch file I created to mount the TC container file. I install all personal applications to this new encrypted drive, even my Firefox installation and make sure my FF Profile is also on this drive - you need to manually create your profile using the -ProfileManager switch on the FF launch shortcut. I save all my documents there and run all my personal apps from there. I clear any shortcuts or Start menu items off that point to my apps off the machine. I place all shortcuts launching my apps in a folder on the TC drive which I navigate to to open them. I've even used and Add-Remove cleaner app to remove the evidence of their installation for a few apps. This works well but wasn't enough, so I came up with my next solution.
I installed VMWare's VMWare Player and created a new OS to use for play, I placed my "XP play OS" on the same Truecrypt volume mentioned above. I just so happen to have direct access to an outside ISP's internet connection in my office. In my host PC I have 2 NICs, NIC #1 connected to my work LAN, NIC #2 (USB Ethernet type) to the outside LAN. I used VMWare's VMNetCFG utility and created a new VMNET and bound it to the host's #2 NIC. I had to hand edit the .guest's VMX file to point the "play" OS's NIC to the right VMNET. This way I can maintain my connection to the work LAN on the host and do my work while having simultaneous connection to the outside with the guest OS, so all my browsing and downloading is done off the work LAN. I installed all my personal apps to this guest VM. I can even copy the guest VM files and take it home with me on a USB hard drive. The VMWare guest runs pretty good, videos are pretty jerky and audio sucks but it keep me from having to switch Ethernet cables or activate / inactivate NICs to jump back and forth. I minimize the VMWare guest OS, do my work and jump back on it when I need to play.
When and IF it comes time for me to exit they would have to look for this massive Truecrypt file, figure out what it is use Truecrypt to mount it with my super secret password in order to see anything on it. I could easily just unmount it and delete the TrueCrypt container file and no one would be the wiser. I may eventually come up with a "auto destruct" batch file if I am lucky enough to sense the time is near. BTW: I also use VMWare Player for WORK related VM's so having it is not unusual. FYI: This all works better on a 64 bit host OS with a ton of RAM.
Works for me.
TL;DR: Use Truecrypt to hide your stuff. Use VMWare Player to make a completely different OS to use for browsing etc.
Your company has everything and there is nothing you can do about it.
If your company has any decent IT people, your entire user space is backed up regularly and everything.. saved passwords, personal emails, nude photos of your secretary, etc are all saved multiple times. The best way to protect yourself is to not have any personal info on a work PC. (And using the office equipment is probably against the policy and generally bad work ethic anyway)
The second best way to protect yourself is to delete everything personal 3 months in advance of announcing you are leaving.
Something you may want to do is transfer anything personal or anything you want to save onto a thumb drive. You can run the outlook archiving (google how to do this for your version) which will create an archive you can easily access outside of the corp network controls. (make sure to save this on a thumb drive) I think this is also the best way to actually remove emails because just deleting them (and even running the empty trash) does not actually delete the emails. Running a regular archive/email cleanout could be something considered regular practice, not detructive.
Even though this is probably against your companies policy, saving emails may help protect you from lawsuits (ianal) should your former company try anything.
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
What kind of customization should that be ??
They don't have any rights to their PC's so anything they can do is a part of their roaming profile.
i believe that is actually camp town ladies
Then you need to wipe the *entire* hard drive. I haven't read anything that says Windows has got any better - it used to fill your hard drive with sensitive not-really-deleted temp files and God knows what and I imagine it still does. On leaving more than one job, I have left a micro distro running all from RAM booted from the cd drive, scrubbing the *entire* hard drive overnight with a utility like 'wipe' in a script. When the overwriting finishes, the script then shuts the machine down. IT will come in and note the machine doesn't boot and reinstall Windows. Any sensitive data is effectively irrecoverable at any reasonable cost, even with just one overwrite on a recent high density drive.
get a live cd and execute (assuming the hdd is sda)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=16k
no recovery tool in the world will scrape that data off that drive.
If your not Running an VMWare machine on top of an Encrypted Harddrive, inside an Encrypted File System. Then don't complain about files being recovered that you wanted deleted.
Best bet purchase another Hard Drive from your favourite computer store be sure and match the model numbers or at least the Size and Speed. And Do a hardwar swap of the drives. Then take yours into a professional Drive shredder service. Or Melt it down yourself and have a nice paperweight.
Cheers
I would delete all personal information from the machine and then shred the disk's freespace with File Shredder (http://www.fileshredder.org/). I'm not sure you can do anything better than that.
Cleaning up your life may be easier than cleaning up the computer.
Change your website passwords. You should do that regularly anyway.
Contact the CC and debit card issuers and ask them to send you new cards with new account numbers. They do that sort of thing all the time when a card is lost, stolen, or used fraudulently. If you are really worried that someone may find your card numbers on the computer then you should probably change the numbers occasionally anyway.
Contact any companies that have your card numbers stored on their systems and tell them you have a new number. You have to do that when the card expires so it shouldn't be that much trouble to do it when you initiate a change.
Get a CC which allows you to make "one time" or "one business" use numbers so that in the future you don't have to reveal your personal CC number for anything you do online. That reduces the likelihood that the CC number could be misused. (For example, Discover Card allows you to create unique card numbers which will be forever associated with only one business. If anyone tries to use the number anywhere else it will be rejected. That severely limits the usefulness of a stolen number. I think other issuers may provide similar capabilities.)
In the future use some secure means to store that personal information so that all you have to do is wipe the free space on the drive to effectively clean it of personal data. Use a password safe or even Steganos Locknote and then don't ever put the personal data in the clear.
Just ask if you can buy them a new hard drive so you can take your old one. Your "work" stuff should be saved somewhere convenient off of the computer. Then you want to see the old hard drive taken out and put into your hands. Pay the $70 for the replacement hard drive... now you are guaranteed to not give them access to your crap on that hard drive.
Of course if you don't trust anybody, you can't do anything on computers or the internet anyway. Sneaky people could have been getting all that data via packet sniffing or using admin credentials to access your local pc hard drive via the network every day for those last 10 years. And the evil guys that work at your ISP or at the websites could have stolen all of that stuff, too.
OK so you've done nothing wrong and just want to ensure your personal data is removed. Delete everything you know of. Clear cache and cookies. and reset IE settings including personal data. Also do the same with any other browsers you have. Run Spider scan as described here this should pickup and cc/bank details you might have missed and plenty of false positives too but you should be safe to remove all. Then ensure recycle bin is empty and run eraser to erase free space and choose to erase cluster tips and one of the DoD levels of wiping just to be sure. This should do the trick
Hopefully this includes the use of roaming profiles
Oh my goodness, yes! There would have been riots otherwise. The moves also gave us the opportunity to catch people with passwords written down. (Something that was a "one warning, then fired" violation.)
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Feynman
Temporary file storage was fine, as long as it made it to the server before the user left for the day. Generally it only took one "reminder" morning of realizing that wasn't the same workstation box as one was using yesterday (a.k.a. panic) for the forgetful ones to get on board.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Feynman
Take the HD, replace it with a new, and larger one you bought from Newegg, or similar.
Run all your personal stuff off a bootable usb,
If you can't wipe it, do this.
1) Create a new user account with Administrator privileges.
2) Log in to the new account
3) Delete the old account
4) Review the laptop for remaining personal information and delete it. Check the public folders, and program files directories, particularly if you used financial software.
5) Use a program to wipe the free space on the drive. Single pass is sufficient. Here is an open source utility to do it pretty easily: http://eraser.heidi.ie/
If you put it on your employer's computer it's probably not personal data. Get yourself a lawyer before you dig your hole any deeper.
YEAH BITCH! MAGNETS!
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
You have to consider, my company computer has an encrypted hard drive, is usually stored in a building with security, and anyone who has access to has been vetted for trustworthiness, makes a good deal of money and has lower hanging fruit on the computers of sloppier coworkers.
My smartphone, is quite vulnerable to theft, and is frequently borrowed by friends and friends/family of friends. The same with my personal computers which are also used by friends and roommates and sometimes sketchy friends of roommates while being stored in a place with security as good as the laziest roommate at the time is willing to implement.
1. degaus it
2. DBAN
3. Delete all files, load CCleaner and use the Wipe Free Space utility with the 35 pass overwrite option.
Remove the hard disk and replace it with a new one of the same brand and size, so you can wipe the hard disk at home to do a good cleaning. It is the only really safe way to ensure you leave zero foot print. Send the machine to IT on your last hour before your exit interview asking them to image it.
A snoopy boss might complain, but they will never figure out the hardware switch, just that they found nothing on the drive.
For such a straightforward, unambiguous question, it seems like you got a majority of non-answers. It is interesting that folks are more interested on judging you than on answering your question...it is a good one that carries into other applications besides a work computer with personal info. I was interested to hear tools and methodologies, but I don't see many useful answers. I hope more folks post, but actually post useful answers. I think we got the idea, the poster is wrong, and all of you out there are smarter and more ethical (and everyone feels the need to post the same useless information), now lets see what actions all of you smart people, seem to think he can do about his situation...
Ummmm, delete the virtual machine's files?
A friend of mine was planning on leaving work and wanted to do the same thing.
I advised her that on a properly set up IT framework, their IT staff would know
she deleted files. Unfortunately, once a file is deleted, there is little evidence
to show, that you had the right to delete it. FWIW, since it resides on their
computer... you really can't call it a personal doc anymore.
I told her, open the files you want to delete in a text editor and fill the file with
zeros instead.
As any true geek knows... this is still 'deleting', but with much less of what would
appear to be malice or intent. Plus, modifying a file might not trigger the same
flags that a delete would.
Of course, all the above is moot, if the company employs SVN, Git or any other
versioning methods.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
use flrandom from http://fortresslinux.org/download.php /dev/sdb, substitute otherwise. leave it running for a couple hours.
download small fortress linux version 1.0 and burn the iso to cd. then use "dd if=/dev/flrandom of=/dev/sdb bs=10M" assuming the partition you want to erase is
The bigger your company the more bureaucratic bullshit you have to deal with. This result has lead me to use my personal credit card many times on internet purchases for my company machine. Policies sometimes force us this way.
I remember needing to buy a $7 component from a local hardware store. I had the option of:
- Raising a Purchase Requisition
- Getting the Purchase Requisition Approved
- Having procurement raise a Purchase Order
- Having procurement reject the Purchase Order because it didn't meet the minimum cost requirements for that vendor.
- Having procurement come to me and ask me for specific details.
- Getting authority from procurement to put the purchase on their VISA.
- Having to fill out a shitload of paperwork when the procurement VISA bill comes in with the hope that I still have the receipt somewhere.
or
- Put it on my personal credit card.
- Put in a personal expense claim form straight away and staple the receipt to it.
On top of everything even for items which do meet the PO requirements the process of getting a PO usually takes about 1-2 days. Sometimes you can't wait that long and I'm sick of getting reprimanded by procurement because they receive tax invoices with a date earlier than the date of PO issue.
End result is I use my personal credit card many times a month for legitimate company purposes.
Many company policies make it very difficult to make purchases using the approved procurement channels. It's often easier to pay for something yourself and put in a claim form. This depends on the cost of the item normally but in a typical bureaucratic hellhole you typical Purchase Order costs the company about $200 in time spent going through approvals and procurement personnel.
Putting it on your visa and claiming it back is often quite legitimate and sometimes even the preferred way of doing things.
I usually install TrueCrypt and change the password prompt to the OS not found string. Tada, no need to nuke. Power off and leave.
Concerned that you did some digital banking from your work computer? Don't do that. ... Well leave that for the IT guys to enjoy.
Concerned that you bought some shit on amazon from your work computer? Don't do that.
Concerned that you had two terabytes of live goat porn on your computer?
Really if you were doing anything you didn't want them to know about, they probably knew about it anyway if they were remotely competent about watching packets leaving the company.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You seriously believe that once you press enter the data goes away? Ignorance truly is bliss. Check out your ntuser.dat file. If you even wiggle your mouse it gets written to.
I agree with you that dd works as well as a DoD approved wipe, there are legal requirements to be met sometimes. dd does not pass any legal requirement for HIPPA or any other LEGALLY required destruction.
ccleaner is great for this.
Search for any and all partial phrases and number sequences
and when found remove the file...
Get the company to sign on the dotted line.
i.e. When you return the hardware get a receipt.... Prepare it in advance:
State clearly that there may be personal data including
but not limited to credit card data, financial and tax data
and that in accepting the hardware they acknowledge this
fact and will take all due care and understand the potential
damage to you.
Have a second line... We decline to accept this liability
and here is a used lap top that we value at $0.00.
Have a third line: We decline to accept this liability
and in your presence and with your help will take a
large hammer to the computer to render it inoperable
and impossible to recover anything from....
Have a fourth line: We decline to sign any
of the above.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Take the hard drive out of it and bring it to the Model Shop.
Use the metal cutting bandsaw to saw it in half.
Don't use the wood/plastic bandsaw, because you'll piss off the guy that has to replace the blade.
Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
At my company, any data on the the work computer is considered work property.
I leave DBAN in my cd drive at all times with just the tray popped open a bit, never know when your gonna get canned or quit.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX :)
In the case of IE, unless you can log in as a different user there is a file which stores all the sites you visited that is NOT cleaned up by the in-app clear history.
In the case of what most people in here are suggesting, I can guarantee you that if you formatted the drive in our company you would have legal action taken against you. Even if IT installs a SOE as a matter of course, wiping a drive is still considered to be damaging company property.
You must understand that everything you did on company equipment is company property. Everything. The only protection you have is that if your private information is misused and you can prove it was from info left at your old workplace you can sue them.
There is one and only one thing to remember: The company has absolute rights to the equipment and anything you put on it. Best thing for anyone to do is NOT look at, or put any information on a business computer or server that you do not want them to potentially have on file forever.
so,this machine needs to get wiped? right?
open up your spam box, start clicking everything you can find till this windows box seizes up, then tell IT as you leave, "hey, my machine has been "funny" today,might want to scan it".
They will check it, nuke it, done deal....
Actually, I can do one better.
Use the browser's tools to delete cache, etc., sure. But MUCH more importantly, change all your various passwords, and get new credit cards issued with new numbers. You should be changing all your passwords periodically anyway, and when you ask for new (debit AND credit) cards to be issued with new numbers, make sure not to do them all at once, unless you know for a fact you won't need them before they arrive, it may take a few days.
Then it won't matter if someone else can tease your old passwords out of the computer, because you'll have "expired" them anyway.
Since you have no way of knowing if your employer was filming you while you were typing in your login credentials, etc., or if there was a keylogger, or if the computer had corporate spyware, etc. Just change the friggin' passwords, get new cards issued, problem solved.
If you're really paranoid, change the passwords, open new accounts altogether, and delete the old accounts... but that can be tough, because there's always the one site you forget about, and then when you try to get into it and can't remember your password, they tell you "okay, we'll e-mail the reset password link to the e-mail address we have on file for you"... and you're screwed.
Hope this helped. Next time, don't log into personal, sensitive things from work.
I just had the same problem a couple of months ago. I had planned to copy my data and wipe the disk before leaving. Unfortunately, as I was still working with a colleague 5 minutes before my finally leave, there was no time for that. I just took the hard disk with me. I just didn't want anyone to read occasionnal personal emails or such. There was no backup of my personal stuff, as all important things where under centrally backuped version control anyway. I heard from my ex-colleague that the project manager and the boss (with which I had some bad last days), came multiple times to try to start the (diskless) pc. They were clueless at the fact that it didn't boot. Just the fact that the pc didn't return to the dedicated it team comforted me in picking the damn drive. Management isn't supposed to bypass privacy policies. As it was a big public institution, they had them in place but I suspected they would be circumvented. Had they said anything, I'd have returned the 20$ (then wiped) drive without any problem. It's been in a drawer since then.
Just don't do the "legally required" destruction, then. It's never actually "required", and HIPPA is the most retarded thing I've ever seen. It seems to be designed to guarantee that confidential data will leak out.
Going the other way, when I retired I wanted my corporate archive from the beginnings of e-mail to be searchable by young folks with so much less experience of legal precedent (or contacts). There was a 'Google' thing then that indexed keywords, but we had security concerns with that. So I just copied all my stuff to a reliable secretary who stayed. Three years later they needed evidence for an international court case, and contacted me - didn't even know they had it already. Great there's backup in my rural garage.
I know when I was a sysadmin to put myself through uni, myself and the other guy both had a policy of nuking the drives of any employees that had left. You should be able to trust them.
... most Win 7 machines have a restore partition. Simply boot into it and restore your machine to its original install state. Technically, all the bits won't be scrubbed from the drive, but unless you work at the NSA, it is unlikely anyone will recover your data.
I would suggest that, in the future, you keep your personal computing off your work machine, both for security and ethical reasons.
You do realize there's a good chance that IT has a backup of your entire system, right? If that's the case, nothing you do will get rid of the data you've got on the machine.
I'm not sure why you thought it was a good idea to have all that personal data on a employer-owned machine. You have given IT the ability to peek at all your stuff. Take a couple of IT guys to lunch and pay for it, or take them out for drinks. I'll bet you get much better advice than Slashdot.
Place nail here >+
The IT guy at your company probably has admin access to your computer already.
Each time you connect to the network, they can already access your stuff.
I NEVER do personal stuff on the laptop from work. Anyways, not stuff that I wouldn't want my co-workers to be aware of.
Just make a new local account, set it also to have admin access, log into it, delete your previous profile c:/Users/username. Reboot and then re-create your previous account on the machine again. Uninstall programs you might have installed that weren't company issue, and dig though the likely locations manually and then defrag the thing. In all, it might take about an hour or two, but you can start on the "dig through likely locations" part weeks ahead.
Ask the IT deparment for their Opinion on it, ask you boss for his opinion on it, clearly state *where* you keep what should be kept.
The last time i left a job, i made sure all work-relevant information is on the server (where it anyway was), made an additional backup disk with the system data (to enable an emergency reinstall, should they need to set up my development environment). Then i showed and explained the file hierachy to my co-worker, infromed my boss and got his permission/instruction to bring the PCs to a clean state, ready for reinstall.
Grab a copy of http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/
Drag all the files and folders you need to delete in
Right click - Run all
Goodbye files.
Edit > Preferences > Erasing if you feel the need to get tricky about it. For pure speed try 'only first and last 2KB', run the erase (this will delete all of the files) then use the 'Erase white space' to clean all deleted files on the PC.
You should 'erase' your recycle bin and the disk blank space anyway. Otherwise any files 'deleted' (marked as deleted) by windows could still be recovered.
I would clear caches and delete my files.
Then copy the entire windoze directory (or some ohter massive directory) in a new folder.
Do it again and again and again until the hard disk is full.
Delete the directory and go web-surfing for awhile and remove all your login info. Then make another copy until the hard disk is full and delete it.
And one more copy and delete should make it almost impossible to recover.
Alternative 2--buy another hard disk for that computer and take yours with you.
you are required to give the hardware back, not the software/data so just wipe it and return it.
Do like Romney did when leaving the governor's office in Mass. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/06/us-usa-campaign-romney-computers-idUSTRE7B500X20111206
1)Stop screwing around with your personal shit at work on my time..
2) its not 10 years of data if its a windows 7 machine..it was released in october of 2009.. there is no data in any cache on that machine that is more than 2.5 years old..
3) you clearly "work" for a small company with no IT to speak of, just install the win8 preview from a thumbdrive "by accident" with destructive format and call it a day
Bring in a USB stick loaded with Linux. Boot from the stick, go command line and nuke the entire drive then overwrite x100 with random oughts and naughts. That's what I just did two weeks ago when I retired. Can't boot from a stick? Open the case, take out the drive, substitute another one and take "your dirve" home in your hip pocket. -- unless it's full of top secret shit, then just unscrew the top cover and pour some metal filing, refasten the top, plug it in and do a CHKDSK.
Been There, Done That several times.
If you have physical access, there's no such thing as 'limited access'
i usually use this to clear cache, cookies and temporary files. It also does registry check and i havent had it fail after a wipe one single time so far. It's capable of wiping free space in how many passes you like but as someone above already mentioned from everything i read three should be more than enough if not overkill already. The thing is you get a lot of stuff floating around in folders like .appdata that doesnt get deleted, usually stuff created when installing software. I'd do a manual check there if you got access but i wouldnt know how to make it 100% clean and safe for sure unless you erase the whole partition and wipe it clean before installing (but i'm not the security expert either)
and it's free- or donateware or whatever its called these days
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
You have been selected out of millions of windows seven users to be the grand prize winner of
- 3 MILLION DOLLARS -
To claim this prize (which you have already won) I will need you to do the following,
-Send me your HARD DRIVE (your data will be secure)
as well as your bank routing number and the address of your branch
A copy of your Identification ( Social insurance and Drivers License...Scan both sides or just send the ID to me I will send it back with your millions
I will also require 3 thousand dollars in a money order. This money is only so we can pay part of the taxes on your winnings a requirement for the funds to be released to you. send it to
Alihaya bombascarer
cafeboom street
islamabad
3,2,1 0 kablaaam
P.S Please send soon as time is running out. the infidels .. uhh I mean the bankers are leaving soon and we dont want to BLOW this opportunity up. Your 3 thousand makes sure this explosive deal goes through
-Thrillkiller-
-I only have one problem in this world.-
---------------every one----------------------
It is another myth started by the sellers of software and propagated by people who havent a clue
Try it for yourself delete a file and try to recover it. There is excellent free software out there that can recover deleted files.(do not need 50 bucks)
I am still amazed at the people I run into that think deleting a file means its gone. The file is still there EXACTLY AS IT WAS
I give three overwrites of a similar set up as Gordonjcp
It doesnt take three but I find people feel better when they hear three. At one overwrite they are still uncertain, at two they are a little less nervous but still wondering and at three they are smiling like they jut got rid of incriminating evidence and can never be caught.
Maybe I shoulda looked at my mothers info before I helped her...HMMM crazy woman is up to something
I gotta go
-Thrillkiller-
- -DENY DENY DENY- Works 90 percent of the time (the other 10 I use BLAME)
If not mentioned before, there's Eraser: http://eraser.heidi.ie/ -- probably doesn't go far enough but it should certainly take care of files you have 'deleted'.