Penetration Testing Bootcamp

Shredding files with shred

When you really need to make sure that your files and partitions are gone, you may want to use shred. Unlike rm, which only removes the pointers, shred overwrites the file multiple times to try and make sure it is recoverable using any tools. This holds true for whole partitions as well.

Shred is one of my favorite commands for clearing files. There are a couple of options available for shred; let's see the following output for the options:

In my lab, I want to shred the auth.log file, but I also want to remove the file. To do this, I will run the following command:

shred -vfzu auth.log

Here is the output from ...