1:00 AM
El DiPablo
I promised this back in December, and now the wait is over! I mentioned that I was going to be doing a Bauer-Power episode on wiping a hard drive remotely, and here you go. Along with the utility I mentioned back in December, I will also show you how to wipe select folders, or files using a free Sysinternals command line utility called Sdelete.
In both methods, I am using Microsoft Outlook 2007 as the vehicle for wiping the drive, and I am launching the wipes using an email with a key word in the subject line. Very Mission Impossible type stuff if you ask me.
In the show I give two very lame scenarios on when you might need this. The first one was if the authorities were busting down your door, and they wanted information off your computer (Which of course isn’t wherever they arrested you… I know, LAME!). The other scenario is if you are a disgruntled employee who just got called into HR to get canned. In both cases you could theoretically get an email out to your laptop/desktop to either wipe the whole thing, or just select files. Either way, this was more of an experiment to see if it could be done. As you can see in the video, you certainly can:
If you want to try this out yourself, you can download the programs I used here:
As Mentioned in the video, I got the idea of using Outlook from my buddy Karl over at AskTheAdmin.com when he first blogged about using Outlook to kick off a script. You can read his post here: (Make Outlook Your Biznatch…)
If you want to watch the full drive wiping, you can watch my teaser video from December here:
If you have some better ideas on why and when to do this, I would love to hear them in the comments!
