***** NOTICE -- THIS PROGRAM IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE.  WE RECOMMEND DBAN AS A FREE ALTERNATIVE *****

Napalm - A Secure Disk Drive Wiping Alternative

Announcing Napalm, a free, bootable hard disk wiper.  This tool has only one purpose; to easily and irrevocably destroy any sensitive data you may have lingering on your PC's hard drive.

Possible uses include:

Home users, Corporations, or Government Agencies giving their PC's to family or friends, moving PC's to another department, preparation for a new employee, selling them, or preparing them for donation.

Hardware Vendors.  Protect your clients, use Napalm on returned merchandise for resale.

But my data is not at risk, I fdisk/format/delete my files...

Bad assumption.  It's surprisingly easy to recover files from hard drives that have been wiped using conventional methods.  While deleting files, fdisking, or quick reformatting your hard drive gives the illusion of an empty drive, THE OLD DATA IS STILL INTACT, you simply can't access it by regular means.  Using even rudimentary freeware and commercial grade unerase utilities, it is possible to completely recover the contents of entire hard drives that have not been properly cleansed.

Yeah, so what.  My data isn't important...

Consider the following case study:  To illustrate, SmoothPackets recently purchased a number of used hard drives from a variety of sources.  We performed a series of forensic analyses, recovering an alarming amount of sensitive company, client, and personal data.  Our findings included Word, Excel, Quickbooks, and Lotus Notes files, network user names and passwords, VPN and other remote login credentials, credit card numbers, e-mail, personal photos, accounting, and marketing information, telephone numbers, addresses, alarm codes, banking account numbers, schedules, travel itineraries, browsing habits, and company employee names and positions.  Imagine the possibilities.

Alright, you've made your point.  But how do I know Napalm works?

Napalm overwrites /every/ sector of your hard drive with a destructive data pattern of your choice.  Some algorithms are better than others.  Generally, the more thorough the algorithm, the longer the process will take.

Napalm currently supports the following data destruction algorithms:

Name	Description
Zeroed-Out	All Zeros, 1 pass.  Fast, least secure
Pseudo-Random	Fill with random data, 1 pass.  Fast
DoD 5220.22-M	3 write passes.  First with pseudo-random.  Second with the compliment of that written by the first.  Third, random data.  Fourth pass to read verify
NAVSO P-5239-26 (MFM)	3 write passes, 1 read pass.  First pattern, 01h written to all sectors.  Second pattern, 27FFFFFFh.  Third, pseudo-random.  Fourth pass to read verify
NAVSO P-5239-26 (RLL)	Similar to MFM, with exception that second pattern is 7FFFFFFFh
VSITR	7 write passes.  First through sixth patterns are alternating sequence of 00h and FFh.  Seventh pattern is AAh
GOST P50739-95 Version 1	1 pass.  Same as Zeroed-Out
GOST P50739-95 Version 2	1 pass.  Same as Pseudo-Random
Peter Gutmann	35 pass.  See his Whitepaper http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html for details.  Considered most secure, very time consuming
Bruce Schneier	7 pass.  First pass, FFh pattern.  Second pass, 00h pattern.  Third through seventh patterns are cryptographically secure pseudo-random data.  Very safe.

To use, first download the bootable floppy or CD image.  Write the floppy image to a blank floppy disk, or burn the CD image to a CD-R.  Make sure your BIOS is set to boot from either the floppy or CD ROM as the first device.

After you boot, Napalm will attempt to identify the hard drives attached to your computer.  You are asked which drive you want to cleanse, and which over-write method you wish to use.

WARNING:  Selecting the wrong drive will lead to irreversible data loss.  Check twice, think three times.  Confirm your options, and wait for the process to finish.

The inevitable disclaimer:  Napalm works as described under controlled conditions in our lab.  We’ve tested it on a variety of motherboards, IDE and SCSI controllers, and hard drives.  We guarantee nothing beyond that.  Use with caution, and at your own risk.  You are indemnifying us of all liability, real or implied, through the use of this free utility.  In other words, operate under the assumption that Napalm may break your hardware, cause fires, doesn’t erase anything.

Downloads:

Self-booting CD .iso image.
Self-booting floppy disk .img image (Use rawrite to decompress).
DOS executable.  Runs from a command line.
MD5's.

We are looking for official mirrors.  Please drop us a note if you would like to host.

Other disk wipe tools we like:

ERASER - An opensource Windows solution.
Darik's Boot and Nuke (Another free, bootable solution)
Ncrypt - File Encryptor/Decryptor/Wiper by the cool cats at NMRC