Hard drive & disk password security - unlocking advice & help

Securing your critical, sensitive or precious data is very important and necessary in the current computer climate with such threats as malware, spy ware, virus or other malicious code s such as root kits not to mention the portable nature of laptop and notebook computer systems which can left in areas where unscrupulous and criminal hands may gain access even for a temporary opportunist time and copy your data out of your laptop to a USB pen drive or similar in minutes.
If the laptop is stolen then there is obviously no time restriction to gain access to your user data area and methods can be employed to either brute force or dictionary attack passwords, at least this is true for most operating systems and applications.

Hard drives have the capacity for higher security levels password stored directly on the platters outside of the user data area , which is beyond the access of ordinary means, these are set up and controlled by ATA commands.
There are some drawbacks to this little used security for instance an ex employee may leave the company without revealing the hard drive password either because they simply felt disgruntled or forgot to pass this information on to the IT department thus leaving a headache for the technicians who need to pass the data on to new employees.
Another point is that occasionally the hard disk may suffer from a issue where the ATA modules become corrupt thus invoking a ‘artificial or phantom’ password which then locks the drive from the user.
Typical messages of the hard drive will be hard drive is security locked, Freeze locked, password locked.

Our labs can remove these passwords with sophisticated equipment, tools and experience and allow access to the required user data area.

Methods to recover hard drive passwords do not use such ideas as ‘master password’ or ‘backdoor password’ in fact the method employed is a hardware and software solution which often will erase the sector(s) of the password or repair any damaged modules pertaining to the ATA password area.
Specialist ATA command sets, protocol, ports and registers are set up to gain access to this area.

BIOS passwords are stored directly on the motherboard and are completely different to hard drive passwords and require a different methodology and should not be confused which can happen this is particularly the case as to setup a hard drive password you must enter the BIOS and enter the hard drive password section, which is different from the BIOS password area of the system.
BIOS passwords are generally much easier to get around however it is worth setting this up in addition to all other passwords if the data is particularly sensitive.

If you are an IT department and have not employed the hard drive password system it is worth your while doing an audit for all systems and rolling out this system, this is especially so for any portable computer systems as should the worst happen and the notebook fall into the wrong hands you have some comfort that the data has that added level of protection.

Next we look at operating system and application passwords.

Microsoft Vista has Bit locker offers strong encryption and is also worth setting up and enabling, Apple Mac systems often employ 256 bit AES advanced encryption system which also offers strong protection.

3rd party encryption software can also be of great use for ‘on the fly’ dynamic encryption and further compound a solid structure of security defence to your data.