How to securely wipe your flash drive with Debian/Ubuntu Linux

Tags: Secure wipe, Linux
Last update: Dec 2017

First we want to fill up our pendrive with zeroes:

sudo cat /dev/zero > /dev/your_pendrive

After completion we can check if our flash drive is really wiped with zeros by installing and using a text-based Hex-editor:

sudo apt-get install ht

Remember: We trust nobody so we check manually if zeros have been written to the drive. If you see weird characters something went wrong.

sudo hte /dev/your_pendrive