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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."
Nope, even broken ones can be read with the right equipment.
But the CC info bothers me. Presumably, this is a corporate drive that got resold (Unless you know of 170 ppl with 25 credit cards a piece, in which case it's time to re-evaluate the financial system in this country).
Personally, I have a standing policy in my department to take apart every HDD, take a magnet to each platter, and send the platters to Iron Mountain for destruction. Then again, we deal with large financial institutions, so we have to be extreme and obsessive-compulsive, which brings me to my actual point;
This stuff should be regulated. If you store personal info on an HDD for business purposes, you should have a legal responsibility (i.e. one that comes with repricussions if not met) to ensure that even after a drive is retired, the data is safe.
Just my $.02
If you read the article you'll notice that many of the drives belonged to businesses; the CC#s were probably in customer lists. Now why was the parent modded "+5 insightful" rather than "-1 didn't RTFA"?
Data mining is statistical analysis of structured or unstructured data to discover unknown relationships.
At best, this is voyeurism. At worst, it's espionage.
[OP's hard drives won't be read, he claims] not if i've cracked them open and cum/shit/bled on the platters after perforating them with an awl
Well, in that case, first they'll read your DNA, have uncontestable proof you (or your identical twin) had had possesion of them, and then they'll read your data.
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