Host Protected Areas

Note that many drives will contain a host protected area, which will not be displayed in the file explorer for an operating system. The MAX ADDRESS of a drive can be set so less than the full size of a drive is shown. The rest of the drive will be a host protected area, the OS cannot work with. But BIOS software may work with the host protected area. A host protected area may be required for some firmware because it cannot successfully boot from a large drive.

Host protected areas can also be used to hold system restore software.

The host protected area will not be altered when a drive is reformatted, so theft detection software may be loaded there.

Naturally, the host protected area is also a good place to hide data, including malware.

Very Hidden Excel Worksheets

Don't miss that Excel includes a feature which you can use to make worksheets very hard to find. In Visual Basic, if you go to View . . . Properties Window you will bring up options for each of the worksheets shown in the project list to the left. There is a drop down menu for the Visible field. If the very hidden option is selected . . .

. . . not only will the worksheet not be displayed with the rest of the 'tabs', but it will not be included in the list of worksheets to unhide, when you right click on a worksheet and select 'Unhide'.

Degaussing

Tapes and hard drives used for magnetic storage media, record data by using specific magnetic patterns. A read/write head will embed data on spinning platters. The data can be effectively erased through a process called degaussing, which alters the magnetic fields used on the storage device. Whitaker Brothers' Proton T-1 Drawer Degausser is an example of a powerful degaussing device:

A hard drive can be inserted directly into the device, which has a listed processing time of 20 seconds to erase the stored data. A degausser's strong magnetic field will permanently damage the magnetic data on the storage device, either wiping it, or rearranging it into random segments.

New storage drives and tapes will have higher coercivity magnetic values, and correspondingly powerful degaussers are required to render the magnetized data on these devices inaccessible.

A drive that has been degaussed cannot be reused. The process eliminates start-up files, as well as user stored data. Degaussed tapes usually can be re-used.