Opus - Secure Wipe - idea?

Off-Topic
1

I believe the below doesn't belong in the Help & Support section, reason why I am posting here.

Somewhere in some forum thread, believe it was about ransomware and how to deal with it, I read following interesting thing.

It seems that latest versions of ransomware are actually encrypting a small part of the file only, say some kilobytes, resulting in a file that has become useless. This method is much much faster than encrypting entire files.

Most likely just a wild idea that is almost impossible to accomplish or technically beyond the scope of Opus.. but would this not be something for Opus secure wipe?

  • encrypt a small part of the file only
  • then randomly rename the file and its extension (like now)
  • then delete the file (like now)
  • then clear the MFT entry, so one will not be able to see the origin path anymore when running a recovery tool
    (AFAIK currently not supported by Opus)

Obviously I have no idea how the current wiping of Opus works.

=

2

I'm not sure I follow.

Do you mean secure wipe would be faster if it only wiped part of the files?

It would, but then it might not wipe information you wanted to be gone. If you don't need all the contents of files wiped, just do a normal delete.

Secure wipe and ransomware have very different aims.

3

I am not an expert on this.

Indeed, the idea would be that the secure wiping would be much faster, just by 'crippling' only a (small) part of a file.

The additional steps (random rename, clear MFT record) would then make it very difficult to recover the files with usual the tools available on Internet. Probably only specialized companies/experts may have tools to recover files or contents, being at high costs though. That's up to the user to consider.

It is a kind of compromise speed vs security.

Again, I wouldn't know if this would work, within Opus I mean.

If not, forget about the idea.