Penetration Testing Bootcamp

Using DD and mkfs to clear drives

The one important thing to note is that deleting a file doesn't actually delete a file. We talked about this earlier with shred. So, if you want to truly delete and need another option to shred, DD is your answer. This utility allows us to copy files to a destination of our choice. However, we can use this utility to write random data as well to any partition. In the following command, I will write random characters to the partition of my choice. This will make sure that the data that was there was actually overwritten as opposed to just having the pointers removed:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda2

The main difference between the preceding command and the command we used to copy partitions is that the input ...