Child porn suspect given 48 hours to wipe hard disk

Post by **Roofus** » Wed Dec 01, 2004 5:20 pm

"The Oireachtas Committee investigating whether Judge Brian Curtin should be removed from office is to order him to hand his personal computer over to it. Charges of possession of child pornography were dropped against the judge when it emerged that the warrant used to search his house and seize his computer was out of date. It is understood the committee's legal advice is that asking him to hand over the computer himself would remove the contamination from the chain of evidence. The order for production is expected to be served on the judge, or his legal team, within 48 hours."

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mariobro · Post by **mariobro** » Thu Dec 02, 2004 1:32 am

Let's just hope he uses some sort of NSA-style info wiping tool, because if he does the usual stuff, they will still be able to recover some data from the drive.

Code-Red · Post by **Code-Red** » Thu Dec 02, 2004 1:56 am

Lets hope nothing, this pervert should go to jail.

weeperofsouls · Post by **weeperofsouls** » Thu Dec 02, 2004 2:11 am

i bet you a judge in prison would be VERY popular.

Veggita2099 · Post by **Veggita2099** » Thu Dec 02, 2004 2:50 am

The perv probably will just back them up on a cd-r and hide it, then do a format on his HD.

Post by **Roofus** » Thu Dec 02, 2004 9:10 am

Veggita2099 wrote:The perv probably will just back them up on a cd-r and hide it, then do a format on his HD.

Anyone can unformat a drive. This would do the trick.

Veggita2099 · Post by **Veggita2099** » Thu Dec 02, 2004 10:30 am

I never said it would work, just saying that is probably what he will try hehe.

SuperMegatron · Post by **SuperMegatron** » Thu Dec 02, 2004 11:36 am

Oh well the warrant should have been in order. Next time lets hope they dont make the same mistake.

Post by **|darc|** » Thu Dec 02, 2004 6:58 pm

Can they recover it even if he zero's the drive? Personally I'd destroy the drive.

Ex-Cyber · Post by **Ex-Cyber** » Thu Dec 02, 2004 10:25 pm

Can they recover it even if he zero's the drive?

This is one of those "how much do they want to spend" things. If he just zeros the drive once there's a good chance that incriminating portions of data are recoverable... for a price. The kind of analysis needed is not cheap. There are more aggressive methods of soft deletion, but people who really want to nuke data can justpull the platters out and run them through a demagnetizer if not physically destroy them. And no, that's not a joke.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Thu Dec 02, 2004 10:27 pm

Can they recover it even if he zero's the drive? Personally I'd destroy the drive.

Depends on how it's done. It is possible to read what was on the drive after it's been erased. However, if you fill the drive multiple times with random data, it becomes virtually impossible to recover what was on there, because any trace of the data would be mixed up with a load of random garbage.

In 48 hours, you could easily wipe a hard drive so that it would be almost impossible to recover.

Of course, you could just take a hammer to it, and burn the platters. That'd do the job nicely.