Readers’ comments
Readers’ comments
Your views and feedback from email and the web
Don’t be dense when it comes to disk wiping
It’s frustrating and disappointing the way outdated security advice persists, sometimes mandated by auditors and others who ought to know better. The 35-pass Gutmann disk-sanitising algorithm is still offered by some products even though two passes were probably ample even at 1990s disk densities. The full 35 passes would take weeks on a multi-terabyte disk!
And Davey Winder (see issue 379, p120) was right to call out the practice of mandating regular password changes, now deprecated by NCSC and NIST. I’m not sure which is the better analogy: imagining that if you could run sufficiently fast you could avoid all the raindrops, or a cat thinking that if it runs across the road with sufficient speed it can’t possibly get hit by a car.