Dod 5220 Unit 2 Assignment

The National Industrial Security Program (NISPOM) Department of Defense (DoD) 5220.22M from February, 1995 Section 5 describes how magnetic disks are to be sanitized via overwriting. Within Section 5 it states, “To clear magnetic disks, overwrite all locations three (3) times (first time with a character, second time with its complement, and the third time with a random character)” (United States, 1995). It would seem a three or seven pass wipe would be sufficient, but this level of wiping is not considered necessary today. The density of tracks in hard drives over 15GB in size, which were built after 2001lend them to be satisfactorily wiped with one pass. According to Kissel, Regenscheid, Scholl & Stine (2014), one pass of a fixed data value is sufficient to clear a hard drive, but also states more than one pass is optional. The reason for the new idea of using one wiping pass comes from the lack of space between the tracks and how the writing heads are large enough to cover the space between the tracks. The majority of hard drive wiping tools tout they are DoD 5220.22M compliant and some are actually certified as compliant.
Each program has multiple wiping methods, including DoD 5220.22M three/seven pass and Gutmann overwriting methods. They all provide DoD 5220.22M rated wiping methods or three or seven pass with a verification read pass. Both programs are executed via a bootable CD or USB flash drive. DBAN is not certified, but has been used and tested by security professional for years. Active KillDisk is certified as a DoD 5220.22M compliant wiping program. A company I used to work for, wanted to see if the any data could be pulled from the hard drives, so a Forensic company was hired to test the drives. Forensic ToolKit and EnCase were used to try and recover data from hard drives wiped with Active KillDisk and DBAN without