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110 Comments
- IrishJoe, on 11/29/2007, -1/+132If he had a virus a simple disk wipe would have been sufficient. He requested and got a level 7 wipe of his system and those of his deputies. A level 7 wipe makes it impossible for computer forensics experts to determine what had originally been on the hard drives. There is only one reason for him to request a level 7 disk wipe and that is destruction of evidence. This is the man Bush picked to investigate Karl Rove.
- scribby, on 11/29/2007, -2/+54The Bush administration _IS_ the virus.
- DeadElephantORG, on 11/29/2007, -3/+51They couldn't give a rat's ass about the law, or fair play, or integrity. Bottom line: these guys are criminals. --DeadElephant.org
- inactive, on 11/29/2007, -1/+37I don't think a complete wipe of the drive was necessary (if you believe there was such a virus). There are multiple ways to recover a PC without totally eradicating the drive. This is ***** and every self-respecting tech knows it too.
- inactive, on 11/29/2007, -2/+36Gee, most of us would have installed an antivirus program BEFORE wiping it.
Those Bush appointees are pathetic. - aliengoods, on 11/29/2007, -0/+29Your last sentence summed it up perfectly. Bushed picked the guy who was going to investigate his right hand man. Is this surprising at all?
- stevenb, on 11/29/2007, -0/+24Well the fact that he bypassed the local agency's IT person makes it very... very... very... ***** it you guys all know suspicious. There is no doubt he was trying to hide something by doing that.
- theNazz, on 11/29/2007, -2/+24This is the same White House that 'lost' 5 million internal emails so that other investigations were dropped as well. Good luck getting to the truth.
- dcbebop, on 11/29/2007, -1/+15This is rediculous. Why isn't there a clause that allows us to boot him based on shear business incompetence? If my CEO lost a ton of emails and important facts about the way he was doing things, it'd probably be enough to toss his ass out. Now if there were rumors of him lying, cheating and torturing people, he'd most likely step down out of respect for himself and his office.
I say that this administration has demonstrated such a separate, malcious agenda and complete incompetence when it comes to data integrity and preservation that they should be booted.
Oh, and has anyone ever heard of a backup system and archival support? If it's POP (which I could never believe) what about IMAP/Exchange instead?
There is no reason this information should go unaccounted for. There are a billion backup and data integrity solutions out there. After the first incident there should have been a mandate to preserve this information.
/rant - mmmcookies, on 11/29/2007, -1/+14If you are investigating someone, you dont wipe anything, you take the disk out of computer, put it in a known safe system and mount it read only. You dont run AV, you dont delete things, you dont change the disk in any way.
- brklynmark, on 11/29/2007, -1/+13Shouldn't they still get in trouble for using those emails accounts anyway? I believe this is the exact reason why they're supposed to use the their registered, government accounts.
- xatrak, on 11/29/2007, -1/+11Should have used Geek Squad. They would have copied all the data first. At least the porn anyway.
- ItsGibby, on 11/29/2007, -2/+12It occurs the morning after eating Mexican food and chasing it down with gin and beer.
- chrismgtis, on 11/29/2007, -1/+11Anyone that says anything like a format is required to get rid of virus, most likely by 99.9% does not have any clue whatsoever as to what they are talking about and has no significant computer knowledge. Not enough to do much more than operate a McDonalds register that is. Anyone that does do more than a standard format is hiding something. There are no ifs, ands or buts about it. It is a fact. They ARE hiding something. It has nothing to do with a virus. Even if you format a hard drive to get rid of a virus, that is all you do, a standard format. These are facts and no one here, or any proclaimed computer expert or government employee or "expert" can claim otherwise.
He is guilty of obstruction of justice. Pure and simple fact.
No there was no virus. - gridbread, on 11/29/2007, -0/+9This is total horse *****, the only thing you would ever need to remove even the worst virus is a simple reformat.
Wiping your drives into oblivion is clearly an attempt to hide something.
Very suspicious. - one2gamble, on 11/29/2007, -0/+8In my office they would be fired without even asking any questions
- 00Dan, on 11/29/2007, -0/+8Even if we assume the 7 layer wipe was legitimate, why the hell was he bypassing his own IT staff? In my office, if someone did that they would likely be paying the expenses out of his own pocket.
- schroeder, on 11/29/2007, -1/+8You are wrong. A 7 pass wipe has the sole purpose of making data irretrievable to forensics. To a virus or any program on the drive, scrambling the drive once or a million times is the same. And a standard format is good enough as the virus would not have any roots in the OS and would not be recognizable to the OS, even if it was aware of it's existence out side of the filesystem, which it wouldn't be because that's nonsense.
- glasnostic, on 11/29/2007, -1/+8just chalk it up as yet another think that should but won't land the administration behind bars.
- inactive, on 11/29/2007, -2/+9Corrupt: Meet the corrupt. And welcome to Bushland!
- chrismgtis, on 11/29/2007, -0/+7It's something government employees due to cover their asses and remove all trace.
- glasnostic, on 11/29/2007, -1/+7http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00 ...
i say both - objectcode, on 11/29/2007, -0/+6You need a 7 layer wipe to hide the evidence, and you need a virus as an excuse for doing so
- fractalman, on 11/29/2007, -0/+5Did the Geek that performed the wipe even have the required security clearance to access highly secretive government data to begin with?
- thewump, on 11/29/2007, -2/+7Anyone who calls Geeks is an idiot in the first place.
- Delphium226, on 11/29/2007, -1/+6The prez is laughing and thumbing his nose at the American people. This unethical ***** is one step away from the kind of stunts that dictators pull.
- MWeather, on 11/29/2007, -0/+5I find buckshot to be the most effective method. Though I think the administration prefers birdshot.
- Bmarofsky, on 11/29/2007, -0/+4it is not a level seven wipe, it is a 7 pass wipe. That is when the drive is overwritten with zeros or random characters seven times.
- blackcloud333, on 11/29/2007, -0/+4Have you tried getting rid of the latest Vundo variant? It changes weekly and none of the utilities out there(including the Vundofix) completely get rid of it. It takes hours of scanning and hours of using removal tools(the scans are taking place while the drive is a slave in another PC so locked files are deletable). This is not efficient in a business environment. If I reload the PC, using only a quick format of course, and protect them against future infections, this is a lot more efficient.
That being said, sector by sector zeroing of the drive is *****. That would be a case of someone specifically asking a tech to do that. - slicerace, on 11/29/2007, -1/+5Awesome.
- HerrEisenheim, on 11/29/2007, -2/+6*****
- slicerace, on 11/29/2007, -0/+4I like how Karl Rove paid > $1,000 for someone to download Darik's Boot and Nuke from Sourceforge (for free) and press a few buttons. Gosh I wish I made that much money for doing it...
- schroeder, on 11/29/2007, -0/+4Most likely the data could have been retrieved and copied to another, clean drive, then the infected drive could be reformatted. Even IF the files were infected (which is unlikely) they would most likely be useable and if not could possibly be repaired to a usable state. There is no indication that this was done. There was no one saying that the data was corrupted. It is complete *****. DoD level erase is not necessary at any rate. These were government computers with important data. There is no doubt that at least some of the data could be saved. There is no reason to do what was done but to hide something. End of story.
- delrin500, on 11/29/2007, -0/+4I suppose you could always take a blow torch to it too, that would ensure that your virus didn't come back either, but it doesn't mean it is necessary. The only reason for a wipe with that number of redundancy is to ensure no one can restore any data from the drive.
- one2gamble, on 11/29/2007, -0/+4Its unusual to call a outside agency to delete said hard drives while avoiding the official IT department
- mlevinq, on 11/29/2007, -1/+5What all these guys in the Bush administration need is a 7 layer ass wiping, or ass whipping, as the case may be.
- andycr512, on 11/29/2007, -0/+4You are saying that with a clean wipe, a virus which the filesystem doesn't recognize anymore and therefore can't execute is somehow magically going to revive itself from unallocated space? No.
- VitriolAndAngst, on 11/29/2007, -0/+4With Sarbanes Oxley, if your company did not have a reasonable backup of these emails (if you are required to have them, which the White House is, both by law, and by a later court order), then you can be assumed to be guilty of covering something up.
Rove especially was enjoined to keep all his communications -- so he is also in contempt of court. You can't lose email on one computer, unless you chose to remove it from the server.
The White House also has another service to back these things up -- if they are gone there, you can only conclude that people worked hard to remove them. - VitriolAndAngst, on 11/29/2007, -0/+4Oh, just a little fishy, ya think?
- jarbro, on 07/23/2009, -1/+5shouldnt the US government have to comply with Sarbox? I mean seriously.
- shifty2, on 11/29/2007, -0/+4Chaney could have done that in a heartbeat.
heartbeat... no pun intended - ozanweb, on 11/29/2007, -0/+4Whenever I get a virus, I rip the harddrive out and run it over with my car a few times. Works perfectly every time.
- noahhoward, on 11/29/2007, -1/+4In the real world, perhaps, in the government, it means the systems are blanked, often on the entire infected portion of the network. It's suspicious because he went outside the government to have it done.
- Chronological, on 11/29/2007, -0/+3To go even further on that mmmcookies, any courses or anyone I have talked to uses drivelocks(hardware to block io write commands) to even further protect the original data (drive) on the airgap system. The last you want to have happen is a trojan/virus/etc to wipe data.
- slicerace, on 11/29/2007, -1/+4A 7-pass wipe means that seven different "patterns" of 0's and 1's are written over the old data to flip the magnetic grains on the platter up and down so many times in different ways so that there's no way to go in with some sort of data recovery software or even magnetic force microscopy and 'figure out' what data USED to be written on the drive. The idea is that the more passes that are done, the harder it is to recover the original data that were on the drive. A single pass would have been sufficient to remove any virus, and in fact, even that isn't necessary -- repartitioning the drive would have done just as well for removing a virus. Repartitioning, however, would have left the actual data still on the hard drive, since when you delete a file, typically it just erases the file from the master file table on your computer (a sort of "look up" table, saying where file A is located on the drive, where file B is located on the drive, etc.), and not the actual data. The space is freed up so later some other file can just be written to that space instead.
- ozanweb, on 11/29/2007, -0/+3Yeah, I don't even think he's one step away, I think he's deep in it.
- photozz, on 11/29/2007, -0/+3Its a military/government level security wipe of the hard drive. It just means that all the data blocks on the drive have been over written 7 times with random garbage. This makes the old data unrecoverable.
- Beatmiser, on 11/29/2007, -1/+4Stupid question and I apologize, because I found nothing on google... what is a Level 7 Wipe?
- webbles, on 11/29/2007, -1/+4probably means a "7-pass wipe"
meaning they wipe the drive with 0's 7 times in order to make sure the drive is deleted.
People argue that even though this seems overkill, a drive can still be recovered after this method is finished. - JackBurden, on 11/29/2007, -1/+4At this point anyone who works for the government has no moral credibility, especially if they work at the DO"J", based on their association with these kinds of criminals alone.
I am not interested in being told how to to live by scum and people who associate themselves with scum. -
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