Quantum leaps in ICTs expedite the spread of various kinds of data. Rapid advances in ICTs have also paved the way for cultural contents to be consumed and changed rapidly. However, there's a downside to everything. Advances in ICTs have come with the conundrum of security and privacy in cyberspace.
Once companies’ classified documents, customer information held by the service industry or individuals’ personally important data have been leaked, things will quickly spiral out of control.
When it comes to online security, deleting data securely is an important security method. This is because the definition of deletion we generally know is different from actual data deletion on the computer.
For instance, it takes a while to install a program, but deleting the program takes much less time. This is because simply deleting the data off your hard drive doesn't actually delete it; only the path to the program is deleted. As a result, until the file path is assigned to another file, the deleted file can be recovered anytime. This is the same as how your HDD can be recovered.
Then, how can we delete data in a secure and near-complete manner The answer appears in the Manual on How to Keep Personal Information Secure, which was revised by the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) on Dec. 30, 2014.
The Manual on How to Keep Personal Information Secure recommends initialization or overwriting to prevent unwanted data restoration. The manual recommends formatting a hard disk completely (preferably more than three separate times); overwriting, i.e. writing a binary set of data on a memory (preferably more than separate three times); and encrypting a hard drive using an encryption algorithm and key length and then completely erasing the hard drive and throwing away the (encryption) keys and overwriting with random data.
Then, is there a data-erasing program that helps individual users permanently delete data in the way the Manual recommends If so, is it possible to restore a file that you deleted using such a program
To answer the questions, we installed the trial version of BCWipe, Moo0 File Shredder 1.21 and WipeFile, which are easily accessible through Naver Software (http://software.naver.com/main.nhn), to delete files. And then we attempted to restore the files using R-Studio Network 7.6.
We deleted files using each program and tried to restore them. We deleted three image files stored on a USB flash drive first without data erasure software and then with data destruction software.
1. Data deletion without using data erasure/ BCWIPE
2. Moo0 File Shredder 1.21/ WipeFile
BCWipe, Moo0 File Shredder 1.21 and WipeFile all delete data by overwriting with zero bytes.
Of course, the best way to delete data is to physically destroy your HDD, but we cannot go to such extreme lengths all the time. Instead, we can resort to free data erasure software to delete data securely. We need to learn what programs are effective and how we should format our HDD in a secure manner.
Still, even if you have data erasure software installed on your computer, remember that the trial version of BCWipe comes with only one wiping algorithm, so the files you deleted can be recovered.
