How to recover the lost money in case of corruption? Is it
possible to recover data from a formatted computer, to prove corruption or
mismanagement in public sector units - PSUs.
People from both the sides of such cases are often asking
such questions. Here, we are trying to discuss all the technical aspects of hiding,
vanishing and recovering data from a computer hard drive.
When the whole world is going towards digital era, we, the
Indians, are also moving in same direction. The government offices are storing,
sending and maintaining data (both new and old) by means of computers. In
computers, the data is stored in hard drives, which can be edited, deleted and
restored. This is the media where all the spreadsheets, ledgers, letters and
forms are saved and maintained.
In older days and even now, in some govt. sectors, document
means paper. It was so difficult to refer, time taking to create and costly to
manage those piles of paper.
You would have heard many times that in 80’s and 90’s,
whenever a case of corruption is revealed, the documents or files used to be
destroyed to wipe out all the proofs. But, now days, this is done by just
formatting the hard drive.
Here is a real story of such an event, which took place in
central government pension office. In the month of April 2013 when a team of
auditors came for the annual audit, it was found a huge gap between allotment
and actual distribution of pensions to old age women. Upon being asked for the
list of pensioners, it was said that systems got formatted accidentally and all
the data were lost.
Here, we would like to mark that in computer hard drive,
when we delete or format data, it’s not actually the data, which gets removed, but
it’s reference from the OS address book. Now, according to OS the memory is
free but your data still remains in hard drive.
Fortunately, one of the team members of audit team knew this
and searched for some tools to recover the lost data. He got a list of many
such software which can bring the data back even from a formatted hard disk.
The team used Stellar Phoenix Mac Data
Recovery Software to recover Mac data.
The software brought all the lost data back in their
original form and revealed all the discrepancies in records. It disclosed to
the government a corruption of millions after which the culprits were sentenced
for penalty and imprisonment for 5 years.
So, at the end, it could be a lesson for all such defaulters
who try to hide their game because all their crime for years can be highlighted
within minutes, with the help of advanced applications like data recovery
software.
