I thought it would be nice to share with you that I received a comment from Pádraig Brady, member of the GNU Core Utilities (coreutils) maintainers team, on yesterday’s post about effective data wiping saying that he has decreased shred‘s default number of passes from 25 to 3, as shown in this git commit. The commit’s comment reveals that there has been a discussion on this matter:

shred: change default number of overwrites from 25 to 3

* src/shred.c: The concensus is that a default of 3
passes is appropriate for current drive technologies.
* src/TODO: Reference Paul Eggert's suggestion
of enhancing shred to conform to DoD 5220 rules.

I would like to publicly thank Pádraig for the feedback. There are times that the open source development model takes me by surprise.

The Shred changes default number of passes to 3 by George Notaras, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

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Tags: Patch, Security, Software