She was aware of the intern’s suicide from a story the local news media had run. It wasn’t difficult to connect that with the job opening she now filled. This only bolstered her curiosity.
She opened the hard drive and navigated to the Users folder. Then she dug into the folder named “oholland,” the username for Olivia Holland. It had the typical assortment of subfolders: Downloads, Desktop, Documents, etc. She looked inside the Documents folder and it was empty. Suspicious.
She looked in the Trash folder, and it was also empty.
Someone had cleaned out Olivia’s file history.
This piqued Min’s curiosity. It was either standard practice – something she doubted – or it was deliberate. Using her hacker skills, she downloaded an undelete program and ran a scan of the hard drive. Hundreds of files appeared that used to be in Olivia’s Documents folder. Most were statistical data sets like the one Max had given her, but some were word documents. She immediately canceled the flash drive progress bar, not to risk overwriting any more hidden files. She then made the program restore all of the deleted documents, and it chugged along.
She scanned the files, which were all disorganized, and many had garbled file names. She sorted by type and then focused on the text documents. Most were status reports or analysis results. She read a few and they were, for the most part, formulaic and routine, with no abnormal findings. She knew she had a lot of these kinds of results in store for her, as well. Statistics wasn’t always fun and games.
After about a half hour of scanning, nothing of any interest or value was found. So she gave up. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder why Olivia’s folder was deleted, but her entire user directory was not. It seemed amateurish.
She decided just for good measure to do a scan of wiped data. When a file is deleted from a hard drive, it’s marked as hidden in a special table. The file doesn’t show up anymore, but the data is still present. That’s how the program she used was able to undelete the files. So, if someone wants to permanently remove a file, they need to wipe it by replacing the data where the file used to be with a bunch of zeros. Then the data is gone and can’t be recovered. The problem with this technique, however, is it leaves detectable traces. Only a new hard drive would have continuous stretches of nothing.
Part of the program she’d downloaded contained a bit editor. This allowed her to see the actual ones and zeros stored on the drive. She used it to scan the area where Olivia’s documents resided. There, like a homing beacon, was a single sequence of zeros.
To the amateur-level hacker, the data that used to be there would be irretrievable. But to a more seasoned professional and to the FBI, that’s not the case. In reality, the positioning of the write head of a hard drive isn't 100 percent consistent. As it writes, it may be a little to the left or a little to the right of where it was last time. This doesn’t affect data retrieval, because when it reads, it looks at a center slice, which will always be correct. It’s the edges that can get fuzzy, but the read head doesn’t normally go near those.
Min logged into her Pirate Bay account and downloaded a professional hacking tool. This tool allowed her to read that section of the drive over and over. Each read slightly shifted the drive’s head to the left. The first three passes produced all zeros, as expected. Then on the fourth pass, a few ones sneaked in. After a couple more passes, she got a chunk of data that was about an even amount of ones and zeros. When the next pass showed the exact same sequence, she knew she had retrieved the ghost of the wiped file.
She directed the program to restore the lost data file to her desktop. It appeared there, titled “Intern’s Log.” Min opened the file and began reading.
Chapter 12 - Return Journey
“It's ironic, but until you can free those final
She opened the hard drive and navigated to the Users folder. Then she dug into the folder named “oholland,” the username for Olivia Holland. It had the typical assortment of subfolders: Downloads, Desktop, Documents, etc. She looked inside the Documents folder and it was empty. Suspicious.
She looked in the Trash folder, and it was also empty.
Someone had cleaned out Olivia’s file history.
This piqued Min’s curiosity. It was either standard practice – something she doubted – or it was deliberate. Using her hacker skills, she downloaded an undelete program and ran a scan of the hard drive. Hundreds of files appeared that used to be in Olivia’s Documents folder. Most were statistical data sets like the one Max had given her, but some were word documents. She immediately canceled the flash drive progress bar, not to risk overwriting any more hidden files. She then made the program restore all of the deleted documents, and it chugged along.
She scanned the files, which were all disorganized, and many had garbled file names. She sorted by type and then focused on the text documents. Most were status reports or analysis results. She read a few and they were, for the most part, formulaic and routine, with no abnormal findings. She knew she had a lot of these kinds of results in store for her, as well. Statistics wasn’t always fun and games.
After about a half hour of scanning, nothing of any interest or value was found. So she gave up. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder why Olivia’s folder was deleted, but her entire user directory was not. It seemed amateurish.
She decided just for good measure to do a scan of wiped data. When a file is deleted from a hard drive, it’s marked as hidden in a special table. The file doesn’t show up anymore, but the data is still present. That’s how the program she used was able to undelete the files. So, if someone wants to permanently remove a file, they need to wipe it by replacing the data where the file used to be with a bunch of zeros. Then the data is gone and can’t be recovered. The problem with this technique, however, is it leaves detectable traces. Only a new hard drive would have continuous stretches of nothing.
Part of the program she’d downloaded contained a bit editor. This allowed her to see the actual ones and zeros stored on the drive. She used it to scan the area where Olivia’s documents resided. There, like a homing beacon, was a single sequence of zeros.
To the amateur-level hacker, the data that used to be there would be irretrievable. But to a more seasoned professional and to the FBI, that’s not the case. In reality, the positioning of the write head of a hard drive isn't 100 percent consistent. As it writes, it may be a little to the left or a little to the right of where it was last time. This doesn’t affect data retrieval, because when it reads, it looks at a center slice, which will always be correct. It’s the edges that can get fuzzy, but the read head doesn’t normally go near those.
Min logged into her Pirate Bay account and downloaded a professional hacking tool. This tool allowed her to read that section of the drive over and over. Each read slightly shifted the drive’s head to the left. The first three passes produced all zeros, as expected. Then on the fourth pass, a few ones sneaked in. After a couple more passes, she got a chunk of data that was about an even amount of ones and zeros. When the next pass showed the exact same sequence, she knew she had retrieved the ghost of the wiped file.
She directed the program to restore the lost data file to her desktop. It appeared there, titled “Intern’s Log.” Min opened the file and began reading.
Chapter 12 - Return Journey
“It's ironic, but until you can free those final
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