Does the following worry you or not?

1. Deleted files on your computer can be recovered.

2. You may opt to occasionally clear Cookies, History and Temporary Internet Files but a record of your browsing still exists in .dat files.

3. The only sure way to stop anyone from reading a hard drive is to physically destroy it. For example, knock it to pieces with a hammer.

I expect you are like me and don’t go anywhere ‘dodgy’ on the Internet and maybe don’t have any sensitive or embarrassing files anyway. Even so, do you worry about the above points …and, if so, to what level?

Does it worry you at all?

Do you get a slightly uneasy feeling when the subject is brought up but put it to the back of your mind, reasoning that no one would be interested in the contents of your hard drive?

Does it worry you enough to have software that deals with it?

1. Deleted files on your computer can be recovered.

Somewhere back in the late 1980s or early 1990s one of my clients borrowed a disk from a competitor (they were preparing an industry submission to the government). The files recovered with Norton Unerase made fascinating reading.

2. You may opt to occasionally clear Cookies, History and Temporary Internet Files but a record of your browsing still exists in .dat files.

These were erased last night for the first time (3 year old pc with w98 on a Pentium II with 256mb ram). The cookies (1,543 of 'em) and history items went with no drama, but the pc seized trying to delete the temp inet files. It worked after 3 attempts, and shutting down every other programme. I did this as the pc was slowing down to a halt - webpages were refreshing when hitting Back or Forward. Anyone know why those files caused a refresh, and IE5.50 now runs properly?
[ Tools-Internet Options-General-Settings was and is at set at Automatic ]

3. The only sure way to stop anyone from reading a hard drive is to physically destroy it. For example, knock it to pieces with a hammer.

Does this mean that deleting files, using WipeDisk, then overwrite, and finiishing with a dose of SpeedDisk, doesn't work .. the data is still legible to a hex reader?

Further to Q2 .. where are these .dat files?

Well personally I'd say that the method of deleting the file and then overwriting it several times over with 1s and 0s would just have to be good enough. However, it is said that scraps of information can still be recovered if someone with the right skills is determined enough to get it. This is why the hammer is often recommended if you want to be absolutely sure that information is 100% unrecoverable.

There is a .dat file in the cookies folder. I have read that other hidden ones are in the History and the Temporary Internet Files folder, but all I can ever see are the Cookies and Temporary Internet Files ones.

Because I delete cookies from time to time I also wipe the Index.dat files. There are various bits of software to be found that automate this. A search on index.dat will highlight the concerns of some peolple over these files. Some are selling clean-up software some are not.

I have nothing to hide (honest!) but just don't like the idea that someone could see where I've been on the Net. It's just a privacy thing.

Regarding the Refresh on going backwards and forwards. Maybe it was using cache but if it was large perhaps the browser was taking a time to find things. Unsure on that though.

Whilst on the subject of refresh and cache I sometimes find that only about half of the icons in an FT load when I first open a page. I then hit the Refresh button and they all load. This only happens in IE. Netscape loads all icons when the page opens. I have had this a little with other sites but FT seems to do it the most.

Does anyone else experience this?

I am of the same feeling that, although I don't visit such sites, I am a little concerned that my drive could be 'seen' at any time. .dat files can be deleted though, but that's not the end of it.

Well TW - i remember watching a discovery crime show in which the investigators were able to get details from an abused floppy disk (in fact the foil was torn and in a million pieces); So I bet a genius could retrive info from a 'hammered' drive. (But I believe exposing the drive to avery strong magnetic field will make the info unreadable - but where will i go to get a strong magnetic field?)
Guess you are never alone!

When I was a TV engineer, long before I ever turned a computer on, I used to have a tool called a de-gaussing stick. It was used for de -magnetiseing CRT shadow masks. It produced a pretty strong magnetic field. Maybe I'll get another one and go into the disk erasing business.

I didn't know there was any such thing as "security" on the internet . Yes, I'm being facetious (sp?) here.

I have a little software application called Cookie Pal. It announces all cookies to me and I can either accept or reject a single cookie or, I an accept or reject all cookies from that source. However, in order to view certain places I must accept cookies (like FT).

Anyway, temp files and cookies are the main reason I choose not to do banking or pay bills on line. I don't even keep credit card numbers or bank numbers in my Quicken program. I listened to a radio show (something like radio's version of 60 Minutes) about banks and hackers. I was stunned at how often banks are blackmailed by computer thieves. So, if my personal numbers aren't on my computer, they cannot be hacked.

And lastly, one bit of humor. I'm glad I can laugh about it now. As some of you may know, my seasonal job is with an international wine competition. I do all the data entry for the wine entries. Well, one of my co-workers found a really delicious wine they thought we should invite to enter the competition. We did not know who the distributor was, so that's easy -- just look it up on line! I went to Yahoo and typed in the name of the wine for a search. The brand name is Fat Bastard. You can imagine the hits I came up with. Porno windows were flying up all over my screen! And I couldn't get them to stop!

Subsequently (and this is on a network!), I was bombarded with porno ads and pop-ups. Mysteriously this was just about the time that the network administrator started sending emails about employees not doing casual internet visits!

A strange but unforgettable name for a wine. What country was it from?

I had a similar thing when I registered my television repair web site with the search engines. To check it's ranking I typed in 'tv' and got quite a few cross-dressing sites.

We do our banking online. I suppose we have been doing this for around 18 months now with no trouble. The service does, of course, run on a secure site.

I don't know what the chances are of anyone finding and using our bank account are but, the way I see it, the onus would be on the bank if there were any losses. Since they offer the service I think it is up to them to make it secure.

There is an option within IE that stops encrypted pages being stored to disk so transactions and passwords are never stored. I think that with this option in place there would be nothing to find on the disk relating to our banking details.

I'm reasonably confident about Internet banking now despite some reservations to start with.

I've also bought quite alot of software and other items online using a credit card. So far we have had no reason for concern. I'm fairly sure none of that has ever been written to disk either, so again details are not recoverable ...unlike data that has been saved.

I saw a very interesting program last night on National Geographic about Hackers. If anybody has seen it then you will know what I'm talking about. Basically, they intererviewed active and ex-hackers about what they've done, and what they do now. Some of them are used by major firms to test their online security, while one in particular spoke of hacking into a major high street banks mainframe and easily transferring anything frmo ay account to another. One other hacker was challenged to get into a system, and alter it. It didn't take him long at all. So, the question is, is hacking a good thing or a bad thing? Based on what I saw last night, I reckon a child of 8 could quite easily guess a password for some of the major systems. My opinion is this: Security is much better now because of hackers, so where would we be without them?

Telly, that wine was actually a very tasty chardonnay from France. I do believe it comes in other flavors, too. sip, sip!

This webpage concerning inet security makes for interesting reading, as does this one about hidden files in windows .. this second site is anti-MS and uses the f word quite often.

Funny story, June! I can see how you wouldn't be laughing at the time though!

I had a similar thing happen, TW. Last year about this time, I was doing a search for cross-stitch patterns. There are alot of sites you can either download and print, or simply print out. Anyway, I wasn't paying attention, and clicked on one site to see what all they offered. All of a sudden, I had about 20 windows pop up of cross dresser sites. I thought "WHAT THE......" . After I got rid of all the windows, I was able to find out that what I had accidentally clicked on was a cross dresser site! I never would have thought cross dresser and cross stitch were so close that they would end up on the same search!

Call me weird but in some ways I find it reassuring that people cannot easily remove 'evidence' that they have been downloading certain material, and for that I am talking about child pornography. When my son was targetted by a paedophile on the Internet, one who tried to entice him into meeting in the middle of the night, it was good to know that the police were able to read his hard drive to see what he had been up to...... hopefully he had time to reflect on his crimes when he was staying as Her Majesty's guest for a number of years. If you could just erase incriminating evidence he might not have been punished as severely for his crimes.

Well , I guess every dark cloud has a silver lining.

Thanks for all the good info.

now I know what's chewing up all my diskspace. Here at work I've found 39,782 files in 12 folders taking up 218mb of diskspace .. there are copies of web pages I visited in August 2000! The 12 folders were inside here:
Windows-Temporary Internet Files-Content.IE5

So, Gt, would it matter if that were all deleted? I've just looked at mine, (geez, didn't even know it was there,) and there are 74, 000 files in 39 folders taking up 462mb. Is it safe to delete them? Does it really matter if they are there if I have heaps of space anyway?

strewth, look at how many you've got!
I'm trying to delete them, a few at a time using Ctrl-Shift and highlighting them, but the pc has a seizure, and a mild stroke. I think Edit-Select All-Delete, will crash the pc. I wonder how many I've got at home ..

I've got heaps of diskspace too, but I'll slowly delete them as disks "run better" with more space (tw is better qualified on this point) .. but first I'm having a gheez, real interesting stuff!

If I click on one to have a look it comes up with "running a system command on this item may be unsafe. Do you wish to continue". Those messages always scare me so I haven't looked any further. Were you getting that?

To delete temporary internet folders:

Go to Start Menu/Control Panel/Internet Options
In the General tab, click 'delete files' under the temporary internet folders sub'heading. There you go! all gone!

In reply to:

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strewth, look at how many you've got!

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Ah yeah, I get around.

Where you've visited gets stored for ages and many of the sites you'll probably never go to again anyway.

If you've got a fast Internet connection, something that might be worth considering is to opt to empty the Temporary Internet Files folder when IE is closed (Options>Advanced and scroll down to Security Settings). The cookies still remain in the cache if you do this, so you don't have to keep logging in to sites that need passwords. (A record of sites visited still remains in the index.dat files.)

It maybe makes sites you visit regularly, like FT, a little slower to load than they otherwise might do, but it avoids the gradual cache build up of files and URLs from other places, that you might never need again.

*Edit* A point worth mentioning maybe. If you're freeing off lots of disk space by deleting all those files, a good old defrag might be in order.