Security 101 Computing Services Information Security Office. • Use Identity Finder to securely delete files that contain Restricted data • Use the Computer Recycling Program to dispose of electronic media. Your concerns to your manager or contact the Information Security Office (ISO) at. CJIS Security Policy Resource Center. Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) CIRG.
I've been using this for years, it works flawlessly and I know when it's complete everything is gone!
Works like a charm! My setup: Sun fire 4500 Thumper; Disks: 48; Size: 48TB; Time for short DoD 5220.22-M for all of them: 135 hours. Autonuke used. Simply perfect!!!!
Works like a dream and process is smooth as butter if u can read and know how to press buttons on a keyboard and follow instructions as if you were playing Stanley's Parable or something. (You'd be surprised how many people folded when they see it looks related to a command line interface when it isn't.) Excellent program, and highly effective. I am not sure about the support of the program cause like, I never had to contact them cause of how simple this is so I'll just put 'Excellent.'
so super easy to use. make USB bootable using RUFUS. set bios to boot from USB. Type autonuke DONE! 10/10 this works
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There are lots of ways to obliterate sensitive data from of your drive: blast furnaces, degaussers (magnet field generators), sledgehammers, and secure-deletion software among them. These tools vary in effectiveness—especially as applied variously to hard drives, solid-state drives, and USB flash drives—and in the subsequent usability of the drive.
For the sake of argument (and a more interesting article), let’s assume you’d like to preserve your drive’s functionality. This rules out violence and degaussing, which, though wonderfully effective and perhaps therapeutic, will render a drive useless. Excluding those options leaves you with a choice between software and software-combined-with-firmware methods.
Free secure-erase utilities
You can easily erase an entire hard drive or SSD by using any of the free utilities listed below. All invoke the secure-erase (sometimes called quick-erase) functions integrated into nearly every ATA/SATA drive produced since 2001. By and large it’s a great feature, but using it on older drives has some potential pitfalls, such as buggy implementations, an out-of-date BIOS, or a drive controller that won’t pass along the commands. You might also need to fiddle with the ATA/IDE/AHCI settings in your BIOS, and in most cases the drive should be mounted internally.
I’ve never had a problem secure-erasing a hard drive, but about a year ago I did brick a Crucial M500 SSD. (A firmware problem was probably responsible for this disaster; Crucial accepted the drive for return but never told me why the hardware had gone belly-up.) An enhanced secure-erase operation overwrites a drive’s housekeeping data as well as its normal user-data areas, but at least one vendor (Kingston) told me that its normal secure-erase routine does both, too. In the bad old days, running a secure-erase on some SSDs sometimes left data behind.
Depending on the controller you use (notably SandForce), a secure-erase can be cryptographic or physical. If a drive is encrypted—and some are by nature—a secure-erase operation simply deletes the encryption keys, and then regenerates them. Without the original keys, the data is useless. A physical erase involves zapping the drive’s magnetic particles or NAND cells back to their default state.
To entirely avoid the danger of erasing the wrong drive in a multiple-drive system, you should power down, disconnect all of the drives except the one to be erased, and then boot from a CD or a flash drive with the utility that does the job. I learned that lesson the hard way.
Linux-based boot disc Parted Magic (formerly donationware, now free to use but $5 to download) has many features, including a file manager and a partition manager. It’s handy for recovering data and operating systems, but it also has a link on its desktop to DiskEraser, a simple utility that will erase your drive or invoke the drive’s own secure-erase routine. Parted Magic is basic and lightweight, and it will work with any drive. In fact, several SSD vendors recommend it—though the recommendations date from when it was completely free.
Little, command-line-lovely HDDerase.exe isn’t for inexperienced users—it’s a bit too geeky and can require multiple steps. Another drawback of the app is that it can’t bypass the frozen security stat that most modern drives employ to avoid malware erasures. But otherwise it invokes the secure-erase function just fine. It also comes in .ISO form, so you can burn it to disc or create a bootable flash drive from it.
Note that the NSA sponsored HDDerase. Yes, the folks there like to secure as well as monitor data. Not to mention dip their hands into open-source security projects. Interpret that historical nugget as you will.
Most drive vendors provide a utility that can run S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics to check drive health, update firmware, and invoke a drive’s secure-erase routine. Odds are you’ll have to sign an agreement accepting that the tool may brick your drive—but hey, that’s life in the big city. A short list of such utilities includes Data Lifeguard (from Western Digital), Drive Fitness Test (from Hitachi), OCZ Toolbox, Samsung Magician (SSD only), and SeaTools (from Seagate).
For hard drives only: Block-overwrite software
Block-overwrite software is more versatile than the secure-erase command because it lets you wipe data from a hard drive while leaving the operating system, program files, and other keepers intact. Unfortunately, this type of software is ineffective on SSDs or USB flash drives, and in many cases it can’t wipe a hard drive’s HPA (Host Protected Area), which contains data about the low-level organization of the drive. That said, with high-powered algorithms and multiple passes, it will effectively render your data unreadable even when subjected to all but the most expensive forensic techniques.
O&O SafeErase 7 ($30, free demo) is a jack-of-all-trades that can remove individual files and folders or erase entire partitions and disks. Like the previously reviewed PrivaZer, SafeErase scans your hard drive for possibly sensitive files, presents them to you for inspection (or you can elect to accept its assessment across the board), deletes them, and then wipes them. SafeErase did a good job of finding sensitive stuff while ignoring what I wanted to save, and it includes options on general types of files to look for.
SafeErase can also wipe free space (erasing the tracks left by deleted files) and your entire computer (all drives, everything), though those options aren’t available in the demo version. But the $30 that O&O charges for those extra features may money well spent if you want to maintain a clean system. SafeErase is a nicely realized, versatile>