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-


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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.

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

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?

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.

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!

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