You hear a commotion outside: Vehicles, dogs, soldiers. Carefully, you peer out of the window and see half of the Russian army on the street below. A soldier looks up lazily, catches your eye, and shouts something in Russian. Drat! They must have locked in on the signal!
You’ve got to destroy the data on the floppy disk before they get to you. You have to destroy the evidence. But how?
Luckily you’ve installed Linux on your notebook and can use the shred command (note for British English readers, such as James Bond: that’s shred, not shread).
The shred command wipes data by overwriting it many times, to the extent that—it’s claimed—even forensic examination can’t recover the data.
The following command is all that’s needed to wipe a floppy disk securely:
shred /dev/fd0
By replacing the /dev device name, entire hard disk partitions can be wiped (use the command with care!).
Shred can also be used to wipe individual files too, although there’s a question mark over how effective it can be on journalled file systems like ext3 and reiserfs (it should work OK with ext3, however). At the end of the day the only way to be sure is to completely destroy the disk.
Back in the Moscow hotel room there’s a hammering at your door. Then the door splinters as an axe is pushed room. Sweating and pallid, you glance at the BASH command line. 2% complete. What the…!?
As the soldiers grab you in an armlock and drag you away, you curse yourself for not reading the shred documentation. If you had, you would have realized it takes 20 minutes to wipe a floppy disk.
THE END
