Permanently Delete All Data on Your Harddisk

PawEng — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:39:52 +0000

When you get rid of your computer, how do you get rid of the data on it? How do you make sure that nobody can recover your personal data from it. Formatting the harddisk is not enough. It is still possible to recover files from a formatted disk. The Read Write Web blog has a story about this. They describe different tools for permanently deleting your data from overwriting the disk 7 or 35 times to more violent ways like smashing the disks to smithereens. While the latter method may be a bit extreme (and it will most certainly decrease the value of your computer should you want to sell it on eBay), the article does point out an often overlooked security problem. It is definitely worth thinking about it before you retire your computer.

How Strong Is Your Password?

PawEng — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 02:59:04 +0000

The Brute Force Calculator [via gHacks] analyzes your password and tells you how long a brute force attack on it will take. You don’t need to actually give your password out; you just enter how many upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and special characters it has. While the results can’t necessarily be taken literally, it still makes for some interesting comparisons.

You can brute force your way through a password of five random characters in only 0.03 hours. Six character passwords take 2.5 hours. Seven characters take 9.8 days. Eight characters take 924 days.

If you only use lower case characters, a brute force attack on an eight character password will take less than an hour.

So how do you create a strong password? Based on these numbers, you should have at least eight characters, and they should be random. Some places enforce the randomness by requiring that your password has both upper case, lower case, numbers, and special characters in them. While they can be difficult to come up with, to remember, and to type, they certain make your password more secure.

One way of creating such secure passwords is to take a line of a song or a poem you know (for example, “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”) and rewrite it by abbreviating words and using Leet (for example, “Lucy|t5w/D”). In fact, you could argue that “Lucy” should not be part of the final password as it makes the password prone to dictionary attacks. At any rate, this password certainly beats the most common passwords when it comes to security.

PawEng » Security

Permanently Delete All Data on Your Harddisk

How Strong Is Your Password?