What system information does the application delete?

Modern operating system is a sophisticated system designed to bring a convenient and, if possible, secure environment for users. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that it saves an incredible amount of users’ private information ranging from temporary directories, where logs, configuration files, updates and installed applications could be stored, to the complete image of all active RAM which gets saved to the hard drive during hibernation. But there’s a hidden danger to that. Do you remember that all keys, passwords and open files are stored in RAM in unencrypted form? If an intruder accesses your hard drive, provided he’s equipped with due expertise and forensic tools, he may get to know all kinds of information about you. This information could be retrieved from the detached drive as well.

Panic Button takes care if your private data, and if the hibernation option is enabled, Panic Button suggest you disable hibernation at all and delete the hibernation file because this is the only way to secure a user against storing his critical data unencrypted.

Many users have heard of “swap files” or “page files”. Such file acts as a cache of the operating system memory pages and can be used when the physical memory fills up, as well as in other cases the follow the algorithms of the memory manager. There can be a number of these files depending on user’s settings, while Windows Metro’s applications always use a separate swap file. The paging organization makes a search for information in this file more complicated as two parts of a password could be saved in two separate pages, and these pages could be stored in random order. However there’s a probability these parts could be saved only in one page, so forensics experts would pay attention to this file even though it’s unlikely for it to become their primary target.

Complete disabling of swap files is not recommended and not necessary, however it is possible to safely clean it up every time the system shuts down, and Panic Button successfully takes care of that too. Also, full-disk encryption totally solves this problem.