I heard on another post something about 0-ing out computer memory not being enough to stop a digital forensics expert with enough time and dedication from recovering the data. They said you needed to overwrite the data randomly at least 7 times to render it completely irretrievable. This seems completely unnecessary to me, unless computer memory has some sort of physical “residual memory” where you could identify the last change made to that bit. And even if that is the case, why wouldn’t overwriting every bit to 0, then 1, then back to 0 work just as well?
In: Technology
This might get buried, but currently, the method used by the US government (such as US military, NSA, etc.) thinks that overwriting a magnetic disk (hard drive) is NOT acceptable anymore, and the degauss or physically destroy the drive and do not allow you to sanitize a disk via overwriting, at all.
They must know something that even security researchers don’t know, as only a few years ago, even a single pass was considered OK, but 3-7 was most secure and in most practices.
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