Except RIIR is a meme, not a real thing to be taken seriously.
Sudo is for getting the necessary perms to write the data to the location after the operator. Cat is just super fast, faster than dd infact as it’s not actually intended to write to disks, only to stout. We want as much speed as possible to do as much damage as possible by increasing our chances of trigging bugs.
/dev/urandom provides an unlimited stream of random data, the output is based on truly random data and doesn’t block regardless if the entropy pool is depleted.
It’s not the same as /dev/random which only returns random numbers from the entropy pool at a limited rate and can block if the entropy pool is deplete.
By using /dev/urandom and cat we’re blasting random data at much faster speeds then what /dev/random & dd are capable of which increases our chances of triggering a bug by quite a bit.
It blasts all virtual device files that directly represent the hardware of the system; from disks to audio devices and so on; with extremely random data potentially causing irreversible damage.
sudo cat /dev/urandom > /dev/*
Or
sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=4k conv=notrunc,noerror
P.s. sudo cat /dev/urandom > /dev/*
can cause physical damage to all hardware components, not just destroy your drives data.
sudo cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sda*
Utterly Untrue :
It’s important to understand that unsafe doesn’t turn off the borrow checker or disable any other of Rust’s safety checks: if you use a reference in unsafe code, it will still be checked.