"Industrial Strength" PC Privacy Wiper - Does One Exist?

[AnalogKid2112]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for the best 1-click "industrial" grade PC Scrubber. Something considered professional and i'm not necessarily looking for freeware as i am more than happy to pay for this type of product. When necessary, i surf via VPN and using Tor so i feel pretty confident about that from an online privacy perspective...but of course, all online activity, be it reading a blog, downloading a file or looking at pictures or graphics are indeed stored in various and sometimes hidden nooks and crannies on our hard drives. And yes, i use the latest Firefox and it is set to "never remember history" but that doesn't mean other parts of the system aren't actively recording and storing our online activities. I use SQLITE Manager to prove to myself that Firefox itself in not storing any online activity in it's places.sqlite file (the FF equivalent of IE's index.dat). However, from everything i have read there are other processes on every machine that is capturing every download, site URL or picture viewed / article read and storing that information in some form in various unknown locations on the HD. I currently use Ccleaner which does a reasonable job (from what i can tell) and it even has a 3-pass free space scrubber but i want more. I want THE best program that exists that i can say GO and it will clean and scrub 100% of all possible traces of internet activity on my box and then wipe the free space.

Can anyone recommend such a "super utility"? I've done some basic research into proggys like Wise Disk, Privacy Eraser, Glary Utilities, Wipe privacy cleaner...but each seems to have its strengths and drawbacks. Hopefully the good folks of this forum can point me in a few directions.

TIA,
AK2112

 

[Saga Lout]

I'm guessing that someone using VPNs and the Onion Router has more to hide than the rest of us

On my own systems and for my customer, I use CCleaner and ATF Cleaner and between them, I've never found anything they left behind, and I do look thoroughly. They each find things the other didn't and even though they're free, I recommend them. ATF Cleaner comes from http/www.atribune.org.

 

[AnalogKid2112]

I'm guessing that someone using VPNs and the Onion Router has more to hide than the rest of us

On my own systems and for my customer, I use CCleaner and ATF Cleaner and between them, I've never found anything they left behind, and I do look thoroughly. They each find things the other didn't and even though they're free, I recommend them. ATF Cleaner comes from http/www.atribune.org.

Hello Mr. Saga Lout,

I wouldn't say that i have anything more to hide than the rest of us nor am i using the web for "nefarious" purposes. Quite honestly i work for a consulting company and my laptop is a company machine. What the company doesn't know is that i consult for a few other companies on the side (never in conflict with each other) and when they recall my laptop as they do every three years and issue me a new one (as is current policy) i don't necessarily want my "for the record" company to have any means to find out that i am consulting "off the clock" with other organizations. That would be bad. So i'm hoping to find some utility that scrubs my laptop 100% of its online history before i surrender it back to my "on the clock" company which is coming up in a few weeks. I use the combination of VPN and Tor to mask my activity with the other companies as my laptop is automatically set to connect to my company's server before any other operations can begin. They might eventually discover this and find it odd but at least they won't discover that i'm also consulting for other companies and accessing their domains, also through VPN. I appreciate your suggestion re: ATF cleaner but i'm looking for something a lot more thorough and complete. Something beyond the level of protection that ATF and Ccleaner provide. If you or anyone else reading this can suggest something much more inclusive and comprehensive i would definitely appreciate it!! I've read reviews of some of the big "suites" like Max PC Privacy, CyberScrub Privacy, Advanced Tracks Eraser etc but i'm no security expert, just a guy who consults on target markets for sales. If anyone can comment on any of these "suites" or suggest otherwise how to completely delete my online history (even "shadow files" and the like etc) that would be awesome.

I've posed this question in a few other forums and gotten no real response but when i happened upon Tom's guide and saw the raw volume of questions and answers i figured there must be some expert here that might suggest a course of action.

Cheers,
AK2112

 

[eatmypie]

If you use something like t.o.r in the future on a company laptop I would recommend using the USB version on an encrypted USB so all of your history gets put on the usb drive instead of the hard drive or SSD. I have a box of 8 gig flash drives that swap out and hook up to all of my laptops or things that I travel with and configure the browsers so they temp save everything to the usb drive, then I take a grinder to them along with some SSD's and that data is never to be seen again. If you know the actual location of the files you want gone from your computer bitdefender has a shred option which when I used other things to monitor what it was doing was it deleted the files overwrote it, then it deleted the overwrite files again and it did this about 4-5 times. The only thing that could keep such logs after that would be an encrypted key logger file that mounts from a hidden volume to log your keystrokes and save everything you do on the laptop. Not to many businesses will go to this extreme, mostly just ones that have stuff they really can't afford to get leaked, or they are extremely up tight about productivity. There is more that I can recommend to you, but all of it costs $500+ just for product licenses.

 

[Saga Lout]

The USB option is a good one - any version of Linux would do and I use Mint on mine. I have a 2.5" hard disk in a caddy so I can save data while using my Mint OS without impacting on the main system in any way. Before you hand the machine over, don't forget to reset the BIOS boot sequence to take External USB off the first option list.

Another way to kill everything is to set up another User Account before they recall the laptop then log into that account to delete the main account. Restart and use CCleaner to clear out the free space then open aa new account under the original name. Log into that account and delete the temporary one you created earlier.