Security Administrator Street Smarts: A Real World Guide to CompTIA Security+™ Skills, Third Edition

Task 10.4: Sanitizing Media

This task deals with discarding or reusing media, like paper documents, CDs, DVDs, old tapes from backup systems, and hard drives. Discarding or reusing this media is a potential security breach, unless the media has been successfully and completely purged of recoverable data.

There are times when you don’t want to purge all data on a disk but just the deleted files. When you delete a file off your computer, the file system doesn’t actually remove the file from the disk. In the table of contents for the partition, it simply overwrites the first character of the filename with a question mark. This tells the file system that the space previously occupied by the file is now free space. The actual file content remains ...