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#1
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Privazer
Sometime in the past I recommended to someone in this news group the
program called Privazer for cleaning private information from hard drives. Since then I have discovered a bug in Privazer, which I wanted to warn about. I have reported this problem to Privazer three times in the past. This is what I just sent regarding their latest update: Your privazer software still has a bug that I have written about befo Each time it is run, it eats some free disk space. Eventually the drive is full of something invisible and no longer usable. I just tested this on a small (768mb) drive. I ran Privazer three times. The second and third times showed nothing having been removed, of course. But all three times showed the free space reduced again by exactly 2 megabytes each time. Larger drives lose larger amounts. In the past I have had to reformat this drive to get it back from not having any free space. After copying all files, reformatting, and then replacing all files, a few hundred meg's of free space exists again. Your bug still exists. -dan z- -- Protect your civil rights! Let the politicians know how you feel. Join or donate to the NRA today! http://membership.nrahq.org/default....ignid=XR014887 Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars. |
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#2
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Privazer
slate_leeper wrote:
Sometime in the past I recommended to someone in this news group the program called Privazer for cleaning private information from hard drives. Since then I have discovered a bug in Privazer, which I wanted to warn about. I have reported this problem to Privazer three times in the past. This is what I just sent regarding their latest update: Your privazer software still has a bug that I have written about befo Each time it is run, it eats some free disk space. Eventually the drive is full of something invisible and no longer usable. I just tested this on a small (768mb) drive. I ran Privazer three times. The second and third times showed nothing having been removed, of course. But all three times showed the free space reduced again by exactly 2 megabytes each time. Larger drives lose larger amounts. In the past I have had to reformat this drive to get it back from not having any free space. After copying all files, reformatting, and then replacing all files, a few hundred meg's of free space exists again. Your bug still exists. -dan z- They do not provide their own forum. They have it hosted over at WildersSecurity. Over there, it is not a group with multiple discussions for each topic. Instead it is just one long and ever increasing thread about every topic. They don't know how to do forums. They think forums are an ever expanding blog. Have fun hunting through those 1466 posts in a single thread spanning 4 years. And, of course, with web-based forums you don't get any hierarchy of posts within a discussion so you can't tell who said what to whom. You've proven they are unresponsive when you contact them via their web form (https://privazer.com/support.php). They make a big noise with fancy words, like residual traces, about doing something simple: free space wipe. Lots of tools can do that. What they do is attempt to speed it up by tracking what they cleaned before and not cleaning (wiping) it again. "Areas already reset to zero are not cleaned which can speed up cleanup by 2x to 100x." Well, that requires tracking what it did before. That requires storing the tracking information. Maybe that's where they are consuming disk space. I found no documentation at their web site on how to use their product. Just a few How-To articles but none of which mention how to delete their own disk wipe tracking database. On their donors page (http://privazer.com/download-donors.php), they mention places that have reviewed their product. I've found that publishing a negative review at such places will get their attention and they react whereas they e-mails to them go into the bit bucket. Then notify them about your negative review. |
#3
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Privazer
On Tue, 04 Apr 2017 09:02:11 -0400, slate_leeper
wrote: Sometime in the past I recommended to someone in this news group the program called Privazer for cleaning private information from hard drives. Since then I have discovered a bug in Privazer, which I wanted to warn about. I have reported this problem to Privazer three times in the past. This is what I just sent regarding their latest update: Your privazer software still has a bug that I have written about befo Each time it is run, it eats some free disk space. Eventually the drive is full of something invisible and no longer usable. I just tested this on a small (768mb) drive. I ran Privazer three times. The second and third times showed nothing having been removed, of course. But all three times showed the free space reduced again by exactly 2 megabytes each time. Larger drives lose larger amounts. In the past I have had to reformat this drive to get it back from not having any free space. After copying all files, reformatting, and then replacing all files, a few hundred meg's of free space exists again. Your bug still exists. -dan z- If you are going to name a baby, look at the massive list of names in Privazer. If you want to learn some new Pr0N terms, there is a list that would make my grandmother blush, and she's dead. That's how juicy it is ! Thinking of higher education ? A massive list of Universities. All obtained by opening the portable Privazer in a hex editor. Though why on earth they are there, is anyone's guess. It's a pity they didn't keep a canary, like the TrueCrypt team. Lovely pets, canaries. Wikileaks will probably shed some light soon on that "missing space". []'s -- Don't be evil - Google 2004 We have a new policy - Google 2012 |
#4
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Privazer
slate_leeper wrote:
I just tested this on a small (768mb) drive. I ran Privazer three times. The second and third times showed nothing having been removed, of course. But all three times showed the free space reduced again by exactly 2 megabytes each time. Larger drives lose larger amounts. There are tools that can help you figure out where that space is going. Try googling "where is my free space" or similar. -- Then tomorrow we may all be dead, but how would that be different from any other day? |
#5
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Privazer
Auric__ wrote:
slate_leeper wrote: I just tested this on a small (768mb) drive. I ran Privazer three times. The second and third times showed nothing having been removed, of course. But all three times showed the free space reduced again by exactly 2 megabytes each time. Larger drives lose larger amounts. There are tools that can help you figure out where that space is going. Try googling "where is my free space" or similar. Depends on whether the consumed space is recorded in the file system or not. Could be, as with some snapshot tools, that they use their own kernel-mode driver, like a rootkit, to allocate space for the tracking database (probably how they can claim each run doesn't touch previously wiped disk space that never got reused and then deallocated again). Those clusters won't show up in the file system via file I/O API calls. Comodo has their snapshot tool that hid its clusters from the OS file system. The problem was when using disk tools that their operation might step on the space reserved for the hidden snapshot files. The result was loss of snapshot or worse corrupted snapshots that upon restore would **** over the system. There is no information divulged at the Privazer web site on how they manage to track what they wiped before so they can speed up subsequent drive wipes by not re-zeroing clusters they already did before. That data has to get stored somewhere. Hopefully they aren't getting tricky in hiding that database so, as you mention, user-mode utilities can discover where is the space consumed by that database. |
#6
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Privazer
VanguardLH wrote:
Auric__ wrote: slate_leeper wrote: I just tested this on a small (768mb) drive. I ran Privazer three times. The second and third times showed nothing having been removed, of course. But all three times showed the free space reduced again by exactly 2 megabytes each time. Larger drives lose larger amounts. There are tools that can help you figure out where that space is going. Try googling "where is my free space" or similar. Depends on whether the consumed space is recorded in the file system or not. Could be, as with some snapshot tools, that they use their own kernel-mode driver, like a rootkit, to allocate space for the tracking database (probably how they can claim each run doesn't touch previously wiped disk space that never got reused and then deallocated again). Those clusters won't show up in the file system via file I/O API calls. Well, in that case, I would think that any general-purpose rootkit detector should be able to at least detect the hidden data. Comodo has their snapshot tool that hid its clusters from the OS file system. The problem was when using disk tools that their operation might step on the space reserved for the hidden snapshot files. The result was loss of snapshot or worse corrupted snapshots that upon restore would **** over the system. Wonderful. I don't use any snapshot/restore/etc. system, not even the one built into Windows. If I blitz the system, well, what's another reinstall to me? (Although, having said that, the system I'm sitting at right now hasn't been reinstalled in almost 4 years...) There is no information divulged at the Privazer web site on how they manage to track what they wiped before so they can speed up subsequent drive wipes by not re-zeroing clusters they already did before. That data has to get stored somewhere. Hopefully they aren't getting tricky in hiding that database so, as you mention, user-mode utilities can discover where is the space consumed by that database. No data on my end so I can't really comment, beyond repeating what I said above: if user-mode apps can't see the data, try an anti-rookit. -- You disintegrated so hard your robes didn't even have time to combust! |
#7
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Privazer
On Tue, 4 Apr 2017 18:58:00 -0000 (UTC), "Auric__"
wrote: slate_leeper wrote: I just tested this on a small (768mb) drive. I ran Privazer three times. The second and third times showed nothing having been removed, of course. But all three times showed the free space reduced again by exactly 2 megabytes each time. Larger drives lose larger amounts. There are tools that can help you figure out where that space is going. Try googling "where is my free space" or similar. I did, and found nothing. Only tools that use standard Win APIs to monitor file writes. Privazer does not write files, it writes sectors, like the Nalpeiron and other protectors did in the old days. Maybe you can suggest something that monitors/logs sector writes in real time so they can be examined in a Hex Editor like HxD ? You can fit a lot of data in 2MB+. TIA []'s -- Don't be evil - Google 2004 We have a new policy - Google 2012 |
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