Data Sanitization
Department of Defense’s data destruction guidelines as outlined in DOD 5220.22-M, clarify secure data wiping as ‘the overwriting of each sector of the disk no less than three times.’ The manner in which the process occurs is as follows:
- On the first pass, all of the data in each sector is replaced by a character
- On the second pass, each character is replaced by its complement
- On the third pass, each sector is then filled with a random character
