Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy (2008) [pdf]

Dave Kleiman had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of Bitcoin.

Prior to his death Kleiman was IT support staff for a small county sheriff's department in Florida. He has no relevant expertise -- e.g. the only evidence of Kleiman ever writing any program ever was a simple visual basic script to automate checking the windows registry for forensic information. Literally the only thing remotely suggesting any connection is documents from Wright which are provably forged and created after Dave's death.

[Wright's forgeries tend to be extremely bad: Stuff like changing the year in emails but not fixing the day of the week and misspelling Dave's name -- in emails supposedly from Dave. Accidentally producing unmodified originals, citing laws that didn't exist until years later, using software versions that didn't exist until years later, referencing URLs on his own domain names that he didn't register until years later, accidentally producing "dave"'s private keys in discovery ... but they're also extremely numerous, so it's easy to get smothered under the total mass of them.]

Wright invoked his former friend in his scheme posthumously to solve a specific logistical problem: Wright himself can't program (certainly not in C/C++). So in his forgeries he included someone who couldn't contradict his stories so that Wright could beg off his inability to answer questions as "Dave did that part". Fortunately for Wright, it turned out that none of the eligible victims asked any hard questions. Unfortunately for Wright, Dave's family came after him for their share of the fortune Wright claimed they created together. Fortunately for Wright, Dave didn't actually help him (because neither had early involvement in Bitcoin). Unfortunately for Wright, all the easily proved forgeries in the case with the estate end up making it look like Wright is covering up the involvement to hide what he owes. Wright's frogurt is cursed, but also doesn't exist. (So that's good?)

Kleiman isn't the only deceased person that Wright involuntarily enlisted into his con-- Wright as also claimed that he was aided by Gareth Williams (some MI6 spy that was in the news at the time Wright started spinning this yarn) and David Rees -- an older academic who was disabled and unresponsive in a care home at the time Wright claimed to have been working with him.

Would that mean that, hypothetically, a bad actor could convince the manufacturer to place sensitive data about you in inaccessible parts of the disk? So short of destroying it completely, a computer (especially one where permanent storage is soldered in) could be assumed to contain anything that was stored on it even once?

Well when the government will become very interested in hoarding old electronics and registering every facility able to destroy them, we should become suspicious.

I would be very relieved to be proven paranoid.

Nothing wrong with it, and it absolutely will stop any kind of casual or software recovery.

However, physically destroying the disk is the only way to be sure. And amusingly, it's often faster to physically destroy the disk than it is to run shred on it at today's capacity to write speed ratios.

Bonus, not only does physical destruction cover non-working sectors it works on entirely non-functioning disks.

Per NIST Special Publication 800-88 Rev. 1 (p. 7):

> For storage devices containing magnetic media, a single overwrite pass with a fixed pattern such as binary zeros typically hinders recovery of data even if state of the art laboratory techniques are applied to attempt to retrieve the data.

* https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-88/rev-1/fi...

If you're really paranoid use degaussing or physical destruction. If you can, use the SATA/SCSI "secure erase" command. Which definitely needs to be done for non-magnetic media (e.g., SSDs).

I'm sure there are some places where regulations dictate certain actions.

From my understanding, you can recover data after a wipe if that data is on a sector that has been marked as defective by the firmware. A software wipe will skip it, but "SATA secure erase" should not.

Another thing worth noting is that hard drive manufacturers intentionally make recovery of overwritten data difficult. Not because of security, but because data that can be recovered is wasting space. For example, if you have a 100GB hard drive and you can recover 10GB after a wipe, it means that there is actually 110GB stored here, and the manufacturer will want to tweak things up to make used of that space.