Hard Drives & Viruses

[-pops-]

It is often said that the only way to truly remove data from a hard disk is to do something like scrub it with wire wool or incinerate it. That is pretty much proven by the number of bits of software for, and companies dedicated to, data recovery.

If that is the case and you are unfortunate to get a virus installed on that disk then whatever your Norton, McAfee or AVG does to clear it, the virus is still there.

How long before one of the obviously clever virus creators creates a virus that has a built in regeneration program on the lines of the data recovery programs?

Am I in cloud cuckoo land? has it been done? Or am I missing some fundamental thing? :unsure:

Brian

[andsome]

I will stand correcting, but as I understand it all deleted items are merely scattered onto the hard drive, (or something like that), and may eventually be overwritten by other programs or files. This is why it may be possible to recover part or all of deleted files, but it needs a sophisticated program to do this. As the virus is actually no more than a malicious program, the fact that it is broken up destroys it's ability to wreak havoc, and I cannot see how once broken up it can regenerate itself. I have only set this out as it has been explained to me, and I may possibly be up a gum tree, but I am certainly not losing any sleep.

[bvw]

Hmm, food for thought :unsure:

[moon]

I'm vaguely aware that a 'deletion' simply involves an alteration to the first binary digit which makes the data inaccessible to normal software. A simple recovery tool would rearrange that digit and hey presto. Pops suggestion would work in that instance but antivirus software stores the data in a 'vault', whatever that is, and I assume that the vault is not accessible to the sort of 'virus unscrambler' he postulates. WTF do I know ? :D