Secure wiping of memory

I have a program called Secure-delete and one of it's functions is to securely wipe the memory. From the manual:

smem is designed to delete data which may lie still in your memory
(RAM) in a secure manner which can not be recovered by thiefs, law
enforcement or other threats. Note that with the new SDRAMs, data will
not wither away but will be kept static - it is easy to extract the
necessary information!

I thought that a simple reboot will clear the memory completely and nothing is written to disk. And if data in memory could survive a reboot, could malware, in theory at least, do the same. And I am not talking about swap/pagefile since there is a separate command for that.

 

That sounds like sneak-oil.
RAM is electronic, when you cut the power it will lose the information stored. Or if you're paranoid, shutdown the computer, pull the power cord located behind of your tower and push the power button to discharge the capacitors.

 

Hi Lucas1985:

That is what I believed. What made me post is the sentence that addresses sdram. And I am not tempted to use this particular function since I really do not have anything that I need to be paranoid about. But if you are paranoid, that does not matter, right?

 

I tried a browser from the same company that makes Eraser and it kept everything in ram which you could erase from the browser using a button.
I suppose that is done so you don't have to power down to erase date stored in ram. That would make a nice function for Firefox or even XB Browser.

 

Yes that could be the reason, however the dev of secure-delete states that when using this function to use only one-pass overwriting because it is very slow. Which makes we wonder why I wouldn't just reboot to clear the ram. I am not inclined to touch this one.

 

Advanced Windows Care has a memory cleaner that will run in the background.

 

K-Ninja keeps it's cache in RAM also.

 

XBB too:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1022795&postcount=53

 

This thread may be going off topic , but there is a Firefox extension which allows you surf the net without storing any data on your disk like

- Browsing History (also in Address bar)
- Cookies
- Downloaded Files History
- Disk Cache
- Saved Form Information
- Sending of ReferrerHeader
- Recently Closed Tabs list


Here is the URL to it. It is called "Stealther". https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1306