DarrenBarefoot.com

I recently got a new desktop PC, and donated the old one to charity. Before doing so, I wanted to wipe the old machine completely clean. I was checking out a few data erasure products and happened upon cyberCide (I loathe that capitalization, by the way) from CyberScrub.

On their product page, there’s what appears to be a quote about their product from the New York Times:

There are no commercial or black-market file retrieval products that have been known to retrieve a file after this process.

I searched for that phrase because I wanted to check out a couple competitors, and figured the Times article would cite them. Here’s the article, and the original context for that quote:

The Defense Department, however, is a bit more cautious and has established a national security standard called 5220.22. This specification requires three separate overwrites, first with zeroes, then with ones and finally with a random character between two and nine. There are no commercial or black-market file retrieval products that have been known to retrieve a file after this process. In other words, the only way to make a file more secure would be to take your hard drive out back and set it on fire.

As you can see, cyberCide isn’t mentioned in that paragraph. In fact, it’s only referenced once, later in the article, in a list of competitors to the “most popular” product.

Yes, cyberCide may adhere to this security standard. However, it’s pretty shite to excise one sentence from a tangentially-related paragraph and publish it prominently, like a testomonial or positive review, on your site. It suggests an endorsement by a prominent newspaper, and that’s clearly not the case. It’s misleading and does a disservice to your customers.

I eventually went with KillDisk because it was free and didn’t try to fool me with dodgy citations.