a 7 pass hard drive wipe for a virus?
Written by Rob on November 28, 2007 – 2:02 pm -Completely unnecessary, despite the assurances of President Bush’s head of the Office of the Special Counsel, Scott Bloch, that that was the ONLY reason he called Geeks On Call to wipe his hard drive. A simple reformat/reinstall is enough. A 7-level wipe is only necessary to remove data you never want to be recovered. However, if your first vocation is not computer support, I could understand someone’s natural reaction to a virus being to wipe your computer clean. However, one thing you learn doing computer support is to first learn WHY someone wants something done, as opposed to just doing it. Usually you’ll know a more efficient or better solution.
What really gets me, is why did he call an outside outfit in the first place? It makes very little sense. It was his office pc, so it’s not like he was working at home on his laptop and thought he couldn’t get his support people to help him out. It’d be both quicker AND cheaper to call the guy two offices down than to setup an appointment with an outside company. And frankly, you’d think he’d have had to do it without his IT staff knowing about it in any way. At least in my experience, I’ll have to admit to having some territoriality about other IT staff working on computers that are our responsibility. If it truly was a virus, a logical first call would be to your own tech support team, usually because you’re not sure WHAT’s wrong, or the virus software installed by your computer people is reporting a virus exists. He’d have to have at least a passing knowledge that he had a tech support team available at work to do exactly what he needed. And, as a lawyer, he’d also have to have an even stronger understanding of the concept of “appearance of impropriety” than suspicious bloggers such as myself. Perhaps that appearance was what he was trying to avoid by doing an end-run around his own tech support team, and whatever reporting requirements federal IT employees have, and contracting that work out to a private outfit.
Either way, it clearly seems the ‘it’s a virus’ story is neither the real, nor full, story.
Tags: Law, Politics
Posted in Computers and Technology, Law, Politics |
November 28th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Good work. For fun I have been searching for “7 layer wipe” and “7 level wipe” all day. Your blog is the first to match. Don’t forget that the American Taxpayer paid for this wipe. We actually paid for his office tech people too, but he chose to use his government credit card on a private company instead. Also, it is pretty important to note that Bloch is supposed to be investigating Karl Rove for deleting files on his computer. Rove and other administration officials broke the Presidential Records Act by deleting thousands of files and emails from government owned computers and servers. They claim that they were “misplaced.” Bloch was appointed to investigate this crime, how ironic! They should take a tip from Cheney and refuse to use government email or computers for fear of being found out.