The Great Zero Challenge

[RadioPatrol]

The Great Zero Challenge

Q. What is this?

A. A challenge to confirm whether or not a professional, established data recovery firm can recover data from a hard drive that has been overwritten with zeros once. We used the 32 year-old Unix dd command using /dev/zero as input to overwrite the drive. Three data recover companies were contacted. All three are listed on this page. Two companies declined to review the drive immediately upon hearing the phrase 'dd', the third declined to review the drive after we spoke to second level phone support and they asked if the dd command had actually completed (good question). Here is their response... paraphrased from a phone conversation:

"According to our Unix team, there is less than a zero percent chance of data recovery after that dd command. The drive itself has been overwritten in a very fundamental manner. However, if for legal reasons you need to demonstrate that an effort is being made to recover some or all of the data, go ahead and send it in and we'll certainly make an effort, but again, from what you've told us, our engineers are certain that we cannot recover data from the drive. We'll email you a quote."​

Clevalley ..... what do you think ?

 

[clevalley]

The Great Zero Challenge




Clevalley ..... what do you think ?

Interesting, never heard of this... DoD wiping is 7 random patterns sequentially from block 0 to the end... and even then it is tough for NSA to pull anything out.

But DD is a disk dupe - so using /dev/zero (same as /dev/nul right?) will write 0 volts biased to the drive (no magnetization and demagnetizing what was a logical "1") across the entire platters, except for the block index which are nothing but pointers anyways, no data - so theoretically it is possible...

I can see it both ways, but I wonder what NSA forensics say?