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What can an attacker do with alternate data streams?
Alternate Data Streams enables information to be hidden within other files. As such, it can be a security risk. An attacker can easily store malicious codes or payloads and use them to cause damages to your system.
What is NTFS alternate data streams?
Alternate Data Stream (ADS) is the ability of an NTFS file system (the main file system format in Windows) to store different streams of data, in addition to the default stream which is normally used for a file. In the past, it was common to store a malicious payload within an ADS of a legitimate file.
What are cluster tips?
A cluster tip (also known as slack space) is the unused area at the end of the last cluster allocated to storing a file on the drive. NOTE: Do not be alarmed that Eraser is processing all of the files on your drive – it is not erasing your files, just the unused space at the end of the last cluster used to store them.
Should I wipe cluster tips?
Wipe Cluster Tips Files usually take up more than one cluster. For example, if a file takes up 2.5 clusters, the last . 5 cluster is the cluster tip. Since these cluster tips don’t automatically get erased, they can contain remnants of file information.
Why do we need alternative data streams in NTFS?
Alternative Data Stream support was added to NTFS (Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP) to help support Macintosh Hierarchical File System (HFS) which uses resource forks to store icons and other information for a file.
How to read and write HFS + external HDD?
If journalling is turned off and the disk initially mounts as read-only unmounting and remounting should allow read/write if the disk is undamaged. If it is damaged then fsck.hfsplus needs to be run. Borrowing from the previous answer, the following steps worked for me. Hopefully this is useful to others: Plug in the external HDD.
How to read and write HFS + journaled files?
Next, mount or remount the HFS+ drive; commands need to be as follows: Finally, if the drive was improperly unmounted or has otherwise become partially corrupted run fsck.hfsplus as such: There is a goldmine of other information there regarding the mounting of HFS+ filesystems. These steps works for me (Ubuntu Studio 14.04):