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Data Mining Used Hard Drives
linuxwrangler writes "One hopes the /. crowd knows the perils of discarding storage with sensitive data but this article drives home the point. Two MIT grad students bought used drives from eBay and secondhand computer stores. Among the data found on the 158 drives were 5,000 credit-card numbers, porn, love-letters and medical information."
There IS pornography on your computer!
I only sell broken ones.
I have been pwned because my
They are using the NEW, IMPROVED RIAA/MPAA counting system.
I can get creditcard numbers faster on kazaa.
People still don't get it. My old boss wondered why I was "wasting my time" doing stuff like writing all zeros to drives of computers we were giving to charity. "I only told you to format them!"
I tried to explain the concept to her, but for an IT manager, she was woefully bad at technology.
Actually, come to think of it, she was about average...
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
or do like this guy did...
icanstilltellyourwifebill.com
he brought a hard drive, found all this cool stuff on it.. & put it to DVD for the masses
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
1979? I was there, home skillet.
50 MB? Try 5 MB.
SCSI? Not in production.
Sun? Sure...
Linux? Try CP/M.
hexedit? Try debug.
Asian Students? First wave Vietnamese refugees, maybe.
E-mails? If you were working on ARPA.
Porn? Maybe PG rated adventure games...
Tax dollars at work? In 1979, we had to walk
10 miles up hill (both ways) to pay our taxes, and they only accepted krugerrands and virgins without
herpes, both of which were in even shorter supply
and higher demand than they are now.
I dont bother sanitizing them, squeezing or anything else. I just shoot them.
.357 magnum, after being accelerated to about 1700 fps from a Marlin 1894C lever-action carbine.
They're great target practice when set up at 50 yards. Plus, they're rendered more or less ultra-highly unreadable, with half the platters coated in vaporized lead spall, and then with the platters dramatically warped, penetrated, stretched and shattered. Many areas are complete and totally lost, the ones that arent, would require precise magnetic microscopy to observe the actual state.
These pictures were of a seagate 40mb eide, splashed with a 158grn jacketed hollowpoint in
Nothing beats the companies who decided that a great site for their "offsite backups" was in the other tower.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Backup all important data to both magnetic and optical media (another HD/tape -and- cd/dvd).
Re-format HD using the NTFS file system if the drive is larger than 2 GB, otherwise install NT Server from the earliest available service pack.
Install Windows NT 4 Server, apply service patch 6. Make sure you use a meaningless administrator password.
Upgrade MS Internet Information Server to version 4.0 from NT Option Pack. Create a default web site using the following as the index page (*.htm, *.html, *.shtml):
Why are Chinese, Dutch, German, and Russian Hackers So Homosexual?"
Chinese, hackers, IIS rules, Counterstrike, Dutch, mothers, US ALL THE WAY, Germany sucks, script kiddie, porn, pr0n, disable X10 ads, warez, firewall, Bill Clinton, rar, zip, romz, roms, direct downloads, Long Live Pakistan, How do I secure III?, index of, Ronald Reagan Library
Boot the HD in a computer with an internet connection.
Wait about four days.
Repeat the process three times.
Reformat the drive.
Donate/Discard.
Hey, at least it won't have -YOUR- important data on it.
-dameron
Actually, I find extensive use of sandpaper after attaching the disk to a high speed drill works wonders.
Barring that, an old fashioned bulk tape eraser also has interesting effects.
I'm thinking of other options, including battery acid, and use as a grounding rod for a Tesla Coil.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
When I was 14 or 15 (long ago), I took a trip with my friend to visit his father and step mother for the day. We would have to help his father in his print shop for the day, but my friend promised in return we would be able to sneak access to his dads porn collection.
After we ended up working in his dads shop all day, we had dinner, went to his dads house, and his dad left us alone with his computers to play games on. We had brought a palette of 100 disks to hopefully sneak our porn home on, so we began copying all those pcx and gif files onto disks as fast as we could. We couldn't risk looking at them for fear of being caught. It wasn't that unusual to have a huge pile of disks because that was how things got copied in the olden days, his dad thought we were copying some of his games.
Low and behold, we fill all 100 disks with porn (an incredible stash in like 90 or 91). We go home for the evening to each of our houses, divide up the stash, and we both head straight to the computer to um, count our booty.
I get home, pop the first disk into the computer, and just about then I get a phone call -- its my friend, he says "dude, don't look at the pics, trust me." But he's piqued my interest so I have to. I load one up and what do I see? A big juicy cock. We had copied his dads gay porn stash.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Unfortunately, I suspect you're gonna have an unplesant time getting your hard drive to that state...
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