User manual ACRONIS PRIVACYEXPERT 2003

[. . . ] User's Guide PrivacyExpert 2003 Compute with confidence www. acronis. com Copyright © SWsoft, 2000-2002 All rights reserved. Windows and MS-DOS are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. All other trademarks and copyrights referred to are the property of their respective owners. Distribution of substantively modified versions of this document is prohibited without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. [. . . ] at PC startup, set the switch on the 1st scheduler page to When my computer starts; 2. at shutdown, the switch on the 1st scheduler page to When my computer shuts down. If you need to disable automatic scheduled execution: 1. on the 1st scheduler page set the switch to Disable scheduled clean-up. 1. 6. 7 Renaming Clean-up Variants Enabling/disabling separate component clean-up and selecting clean-up settings, you set-up and customize your PC clean-up variant(s) as needed. That said, you will want to rename the variant(s) it to better represent PC clean-up contents. If you want to rename a PC (or separate component) clean-up variant you can do this by following one of these methods: 1. mouse-clicking Rename on the sidebar; 2. selecting Clean-up Rename from the main menu; 3. selecting Rename from the context menu of a PC (component) clean-up variant. Acronis PrivacyExpert 21 As a result of any of these actions you will see the Rename Item window enabling you to enter a new name for PC or component clean-up variant. 1. 7 Data Clean-up Algorithms Unlike most software providing the confidentiality of PC and Internet activity, Acronis PrivacyExpert not only deletes Windows sections (files, folders, registry components, etc. ) it also performs a thorough low-level clean-up of hard disk sectors containing Windows components selected for cleaning. Trace Windows data and files are cleaned with the help of integrated data destruction algorithms. Acronis PrivacyExpert provides the user with eight algorithms. Five of the algorithms meet national data destruction standards: (1) American: DoD 5220. 22-M, (2) American: NAVSO P-5239-26 (RLL), (3) American: NAVSO P-5239-26 (MFM), (4) German: VSITR, (5) Russian: Russian Standard, GOST P50739-95. Besides algorithms that meet these national standards, Acronis PrivacyExpert provides two far more powerful pre-defined algorithms offered by top information security specialists: (6) Peter Gutmann's algorithm; (7) Bruce Schneier's algorithm. After using the most powerful clean-up algorithms of Acronis PrivacyExpert, the disk data can in no way be recovered by any modern methods including the most powerful magnetic microscopy!The user is also provided with a simple, but fast algorithm to use in less important situations: (8) Fast. The algorithm operation is baseb on multiple rewriting of hard disk sectors containing user data with chains of logical 0 and 1. As a result previously written data is replaced by newer random data. For more information on the algorithms see Appendix A «Hard Disk Wiping algorithms». There you will also find information on the number of hard disk passes, provided by each algorithm, and numeric chains written in the process (see A. 2 «Algorithms Used by Acronis PrivacyExpert »). 22 Chapter 1 : Installing and Starting to Work with Acronis PrivacyExpert Chapter 2. Complex PC Clean-up Using variants of complex PC clean-up described below, you can clean a large number of various Windows components that keep evidence of your PC activity. Vice versa, if you need to clean-up only a specific Windows component, for example, last visited Internet pages, you should use one of the Acronis PrivacyExpert sections, described below (see Chapter 3 «Separate PC Components Clean-up»). Separate component clean-up is faster than any variant of complex PC clean-up. 2. 1 Entire PC Clean-up If you need to clean a PC of any evidence of your activity, select the Entire PC clean-up. Executing it, you'll be able to clean all Windows components accessible by Acronis PrivacyExpert: 1. [. . . ] However using special equipment, one can easily read the «underlying» sequence of 1 and 0. It only requires specialized software and inexpensive hardware to read data «deleted» this way by analyzing magnetization of hard disk sectors, residual magnetization of track sides and/or by using current magnetic microscopes. Writing to magnetic media leads to subtle effects summarized as follows: every track of a magnetic disk stores an image of every record ever written to it, but the effect of such record (magnetic layer) becomes more subtle as time passes. A. 1 Information Wiping Algorithms Functioning Principles Physically the complete wiping of information from a hard disk involves the switching of every elementary magnetic area of the recording material as many times as possible by writing specially selected sequences of logical 1 and 0 (also known as samples). Using logical data encoding methods in current hard disks, you can select samples of symbol (or elementary data bit) sequences to be written to sectors in order to repeatedly and effectively wipe confidential information. [. . . ]