Wednesday 9 April 2014

How data recovery software uncovered corruption in govt. offices in India ?


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.

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