Reply #13: The way they removed the data reveals his motivations.

[Poll_Blind]

  If you have a virus-infected file on your hard drive all you have to do is delete it. Just delete it. That's it, nothing special. Now, the OS may be damaged because the virus infected a system-critical file but that's beside the point. You delete the file via normal means and it's end of story.

  What you don't do is a DOD wipe like they did. A DOD wipe is what you do when you've got to get rid of data that you don't want anyone, not even a computer forensics expert, to find. Since they only did a 7-pass, there still may be a chance that a top-notch data-recovery company, or more likely Federal counter-terrorism experts, might be able to recover the files or parts of them*.

  I doubt that the hard drives in question will receive such treatment, however.

* There's a lot of debate about whether this can even be done at all. Most of the publicly-available research isn't geared toward data recovery, per se, but theoretical testing done to help improve hard drive technology. What our government is able to do, or what technology and methods they have access to is unknown (by me).