Yes, I'm sure he'll be thinking of you very fondly when the person he's dealing with is a child rapist using your software to cover his tracks!
I'm very glad you find this all very amusing and LOL worthy.
roll
The Point —–> x
x <—- You
.
Keep it civil, guys, no personal attacks please.
Jamie
Thank you Jamie, )
Although on opposite teams, the members here and I were having a bit of good humoured rivalry and then someone who posts on average just over twice a year spoilt it wanting to talk about CP.
Eraser suffers from this kind of abuse regularly and we do try to confront it when we can. I apologise to you and the other members here if writing about Eraser has attracted such undesirable commentary from others.
I suspect even Jeff Caplan (who has been the main target of my humour) wouldn’t stoop so low as to mention CP. The entire Eraser Team do not and would not condone the use of Eraser for illegal purposes especially the type that Chris55728 is referring to.
Again I thank you for you permission to advertise here on your forum for Beta testers. We have had a good response from forensicfocus.com and I hope the volunteers who replied learn something from the experience as much as the Eraser team does. Only by good humoured “war games” can we all learn.
Thanks again for the kind responses here and the volunteers who have joined the Eraser Forensic Test Team. D
Overwriter.
Spend as long as some people here do investigating the most appalling crimes and I'm sure you can understand their reaction to a tool which might make their job all the more difficult. That said, we need to accept that such tools are not only here to stay but they also have very valid uses.
I think the best thing we can do is try to learn from each other. Overwriter, you've had a fair crack of the whip here in the lions' den - in return, what can you tell us as forensics professionals about such tools which might be of use, or at least of interest?
Jamie
I think the best thing we can do is try to learn from each other.
I agree.
Overwriter, you've had a fair crack of the whip here in the lions' den
Ha ha, I’ll say ! lol
in return, what can you tell us as forensics professionals about such tools which might be of use, or at least of interest?
Well, mainly to let you know Eraser exists. I have come here to allow you all first look at the new Eraser V6. This will give you guys a head start before V6’s final release.
You may not like the fact that Eraser is so popular and that it is freely available but the truth is that real criminals will find something to do what Eraser does anyway, leaving only the normal innocent guy with no protection. Rather like the gun laws, normal innocent people have no protection and only the criminals have the guns !
I suspect the more professional ones amongst the members here will probably have done some programming in their past. If this is so then our source code is freely available to enable them to see what Eraser V6 is actually doing when it is run.
If anyone has any technical questions they can post here or on our forum. We have a forensic section there now and I would be very grateful to anyone here who contributes to it. You don’t have to actually assist Eraser but general discussion on data overwriting or removal would be very welcome.
Eraser is not about covering traces of crime, the whole concept amongst the Eraser team is the technical challenge and a strong belief that a computer user should be in control of what is on their hard drive, be that active files or deleted free space.
A few members from forensicfocus.com have offered their help and I must say more than one has concerns about what their peers will think of them. In fact 2 from here have inexplicably stopped contact with me and 1 said they would join us then didn’t. However I see the braver volunteers as professionals willing to learn about the opposite teams arsenal rather than assisting crime. In fact I am concerned about the volunteers from here that are still with me, they will have an unrivalled insight into the workings of Eraser V6 and I wonder if they are finding weaknesses and not telling us about them !! 😯 ….. lol
Anyway can we just ignore the detractors and get back to the good humoured challenge ! D
Thanks.
I'll, for what it is worth, add my two pence …
I come from a security background where the constant argument of full disclosure is ongoing, I personally am in favour of a "managed full-disclosure" approach - where the company is given an opportunity to close their problems before the dogs are let off the chain.
I feel that Overwriter is, to be fair, giving us an opportunity that we wouldn't necessarily have - these tools are going to exist irregardless, and as has been mentioned, many, if not all of us, make use of wiping tools (You all do right ? Before you image to it ?) - we would be very hypocritical to refuse that ability to others who equally have a legitimate reason, but not necessarily the technical knowledge to do it for themselves. We don't deny firewalls, encryption or anti-virus to anyone, simply becuse they may use if for the excecution of a criminal offence - we have no right to deny another their choice of wiping tool before selling their bank account details on e-bay with their old computer. It comes back to the old adage of "guns don't kill people, people do". Similarly, because we live in a society which is tolerant of anti-government ideas, I wouldn't wish to condem anyone who is speaking out against human rights violations or the like as to live in the constant fear that must go with that is totally alien to me- and anything which enables freedom I feel is valuable. This is my opinion, and I understand the counter side, however, naieve as it may be, I have a fundamental belief that people are innately good, and I'd rather protect the rights of the majority than discard the majority in favour of easing prosecuting the criminals - note this makes our life more difficult, but not impossible - there are ways and means, and it is up to us to find them.
I understand that people have a desire not to help, and I think, that in a very good natured and amusing way Overwriter has made some very valid arguments - he's not swayed the opinion of some, but all in all, I feel that he has been respectful and intellegent in his debate, and backed off at the right time.
I trust that in the spirit of such full disclosure that the developers of Eraser would be more than happy to answer questions that my be put to them by any examiners in the course of an investigation and perhaps be willing to appear in a court of law to explain the operation of their software to a judge and jury in a case ?
And, to show goodwill …
I couldn't get the software to install properly on my system (not at all for two attempts, and then wrong for the third - after manually installing the .Net requirements), then, even though I could run the interface, I couldn't wipe a thing … I haven't read the instructions in any great depth, but I found the interface counterintuitive and overly complex. ( Brand new, clean install of XP, SP3 will all current patches applied, running AVG anti-virus, WinHex installed, Firefox, but nothing else fancy or complicated. )
Hi Azrael )
Firstly thank you for writing the post above ! You have a good insight into what we are hoping to achieve with Eraser, our ideas and my reason for being on this forum.
As for your trouble installing V6 onto your XP system I am sorry you are experiencing difficulties.
I have personally tested V6 on XP SP3 and I didn’t suffer the same problems as you. The only thing different that I can spot just now is that I had .Net 3.5 already installed on my system from the Microsoft redistributable.
I appreciate you say you managed to install V6 after manually installing .Net but after that it should have run smoothly.
I will make a Trac ticket for you on our site and look into it.
When you say you couldn’t wipe a thing can I ask what you mean exactly ? Did the file delete but you were able to recover it or didn’t Eraser even attempt to wipe it ?
I am going to push for a V6 Beta4 release soon, would you like me to PM you when it is released or would you prefer to check our site yourself ?
Thanks again for your post and I am sorry Eraser V6 was a bit of a disappointment for you.
I will make a Trac ticket for you on our site and look into it.
Thank you, please forgive me for not doing it myself - I've rather a lot on my plate just now.
When you say you couldn’t wipe a thing can I ask what you mean exactly ? Did the file delete but you were able to recover it or didn’t Eraser even attempt to wipe it ?
To be fair, what happend is that it seemed to fail to recognise any wiping plugins (?) Forgive me please, I'd spent some time installing it and at this point, when it didn't work, I ran out of time to progress it further in detail. Essentially it just wouldn't let me even attempt a delete - telling me that I had to choose a method or something, but I had no methods to choose from … I do realise that this is unhelpful, having been on the recieveing end of such useful bug reports myself in the past, I know that they can be as useful as a bicycle to a fish -/ but I honestly ran out of time on this occasion to go any further.
I am going to push for a V6 Beta4 release soon, would you like me to PM you when it is released or would you prefer to check our site yourself ?
If you can stand the heckling ( and judging from your persistance and humour so far, I'd say you can ) - I'd prefer if you post notification of the update here, I suspect that there are a _great_ many people who are watching the project with interest here - keep being open, and while you'll not necessarly win friends, I suspect that there will be at least a grudging mutual respect as software/security/computer professionals -P
Personally I don't see what all the who-ha is about. We are certainly not on opposing sides in this - computer security and computer forensics should be walking hand in hand. Yes its true that some people use such software for covering their illegal activities, but that is no reason to jump on Overwriter and to lay blame at his feet for such activities.
I have a simple BAT script that I wrote, it simply writes the same text over and over into an ever-expanding text file. When the hard drive is full, I delete the text file. This has subsequently overwritten everything in unallocated space. It took all of 30 seconds to write it and can be done by anyone with half a brain so why do people throw their hands up in the air whenever anyone mentions wiping or erasing software screaming "criminal"?
I am an advocate of software such as Truecrypt and Eraser, and will use them for as long as they are useful to me. If I had time to donate to you Overwriter, I would. Sadly I'm permanently swamped.
I've been sitting on the sides for this one, but I've been using Eraser for years, and I think it's a very nice small secure delete program. The idea that it can be used for "evil" is the same for any tool. Like DFICSI (love your podcast BTW), I use TrueCrypt as well (and PGP, etc). Doesn't make me a bad person, it's just a tool to use a job. Yes these tools from a Forensic standpoint make our jobs more difficult, but then people who have ill intent aren't going to play by the rules anyway.
I'd rather be aware of the tools and have the opportunity to work with the creators than not have the tool at all. You're worse off when someone makes a tool and you don't know anything about it.
Just my nickel on the subject….
Tom