Slashdot Mirror
Second Hand Hard Discs Reveal Secrets
An anonymous reader writes "BBC News has a story about MIT grads buying old hard discs from eBay and elsewhere, and finding credit card numbers, ATM transactions, porn and emails all accessible on them. Comments? What's the strangest thing readers have found, or left, on a hard drive?"
Discarded computer hard drives prove a trove of personal info
--- have you healed your church website?
I've rarely used second hand disks, but even if I did I'd just not look at what's on it. It's kind of like not looking in the neighbour's trashkan...
Of course, that's no excuse for companies to leave sensitive data from their customers on their leftovers!
Simon
The 2 first minutes, 16 comments about this being a dupe were posted. Thats about 8 Dupe Reports Per Minute. What's the all time high?
I've come across quite a few older drives in machines that hadn't been cleaned out. One was an ancient Mac II which used to be used as a webserver, but was removed from that job in 1995, and had sat in a basement getting rustier and rustier. It was given to me in horrific condition, and the motherboard/PSU was toast, almost like it was washed through with saltwater. The HD looked a little better, and on firing it up in another machine, it clattered noisily, but still read most of the drive - on there was the website, last accessed 8 years ago. I copied that all off and archived it just because it was cool.
:).
:).
Oddly, the website nowadays isn't all that different
Another belonged to a rather fascinating lady who seemed to use her computer from 1994 when it was new, until 2002 when I came across it from an ebay sale. All of her writing (some published, some not), drafts, her academic work, and her photography was on there. She did quite a few nudes and not only had published work, but every photo taken in between used to create those images. Slightly giggleworthy, but really just rather tasteful nude photos.
One other I was given, a compaq 486, belonged to an organiser of some of the behind the scenes work for the Sydney Olympics - it had names, addresses and phone numbers of dozens of celebrities, politicians, and anyone involved in the marketing pre-games, along with correspondence to those people. A fun read but kind of boring - I didn't keep the addresses either.
The biggest coincidence I came across was ordering a computer from ebay, from a town about 800km from me. it came to me with a HD full of various word documents - what a surprise to find it had originally been used as a wordprocessing machine in the same building I work in, and several years before. It came home
Nothing amazingly exciting, just a few curious little moments.
1.) All right allready! We now have established beyond a shadow of a doubt that yes, a similar story was posted earlier this week.
2.) It amuses me that people seem to think that /. editors have so much time on their hands that all they have to do all day is read headline and forum posts. That's what moderators and metamoderators are for, and they may not catch every story that comes down the pike.
3.) Perhaps the most enjoyable "data mining" find on an old hard drive for me was over 1000 songs in MP3 format. After deleting the ones that I didn't like, there were still nearly 950 of them. They now make up the bulk of my music library.
I have no tag line
I find it most interesting at places where lots of computers are hooked up to a network, like at a college dorm. It's amazing the clueless dolts that share their entire harddrive over the network. You can learn a lot by browsing someone's internet cache. Also, since Windows seems to share My Documents by default, you can read people's homework (usually boring as hell though). About the most interesting was the person sharing all of their instant messaging chat logs. Lets just say that person got around a lot... The only thing is that you have to be careful, these people who are that clueless usually have a ton of virii, so don't click on goatse.ch.vbs!
I know you don't care, but I was changing out a certain head priest's hard drive for a Catholic organization(Something to do with a Little Flower) in Chicago, and I was moving his documents and found a folder that was holding a few letters to an S&M house down in Springfield saying that he wanted some services and he was a single salesmen from Milwaukee...well he got the single part right.
Not to make this too long, but the funny part is they got pretty explicate about what he was wanting, and when I asked him if he wanted me to scratch and reinstall windows on the hard drive before I moved it over to the convent where the head Mother was going to be using it, he told me no, and I just went and installed it on here desk....God only knows how that went over?
About 6 months ago, I was taking out the trash in my apartment when I noticed a computer case next to the dumpster. Being the pack rat I am, I grabbed that baby and haulled it up to my room. It was absolutly caked in smoke and dust, so after an hour of totally cleaning it, I was ready to fire it up. The system was a 166 P1 and was in perfect working order, dispite the dust bunnies. Windows 95 loaded up painfully slow, but I managed. And the wealth of crap I found on there, lemme tell ya.
The first thing I found was an exchange of messages between the previous owner and a company that had shipped him a crate of mushrooms. Yes, mushrooms. Apperantly, customs has distroyed his first order and he wanted the company to ship a replacement. But it doesn't stop here.
The second thing I found was a pile of emails between the previous owner and his ex-girlfriend. Wow were they at eachothers necks. Apperantly, the previous owner was your average college drunkard and basically rapped this girl. I won't go into the specifics of it, but man, it was like watching a train wreck. I couldn't stop from reading every last juicy detail.
Anyway, that was about it... not CC# or anything like that, just sex and drugs.
Slashdot ought to implement a dupe filtering system along the lines of the following: People indicate in their prefs whether or not they want to see dups (for the extra discussion). When a dupe is posted and an editor later recognizes it as a dupe, the editor flags it as a dupe and it no longer shows up on the pages of people who have asked not to see dupes.
Anyway, the fact that it reaches +5 means that moderators agree with it.
:-)
The moderators seem somewhat divided on the subject. Here are the moderations for that post as of now:
Offtopic=2, Insightful=1, Interesting=1, Funny=5, Overrated=3, Underrated=1, Total=13
It got a new funny in the time between when I first read it and the time I looked at the mods. I'm sure it will go down and up a few more times.
Maybe I should post this as anonymous to avoid the Offtopic Karma hit. Nah, I'll just hit "No Karma Bonus" and feel the 2 point burn.
By the way, the grandparent post says CmdrTaco does most of the dupes; in my experience it's Timothy who is the king of dupes. I want my money back.
Or maybe the moderators who give "Offtopic" mods need to learn how to read the parent posts and see if the comment is really off topic or not.
Tangents can and do appear. While they may be "off topic" for the main heading they can be on topic for the context of the thread. For a bunch of people who gripe about context (benchmarks, blame for root exploits, etc) the "Offtopic" mod seems to be used improperly more often than not.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those that need closure
You're Nerds right? You like Nerdy things right? Why not write a simple bit of software to help avoid these duplicate mailings?!
A simple algorythm (no doubt it can be vastly improved) would be to check any news story being submitted against the previous stories, and look for matches based on a point system. For example, we can see the following similarities in this story and the duplicate:
date proximity:
- 5 days
multi word match (count "-" and " " as whitespace):- "MIT grad"
- "credit-card numbers"
single word match:- hard
- drives
- eBay
- porn
- MIT
- grad
- credit
- card
- numbers
This would represent a *lot* of points. You could then warn the submitter that 1 or more articles looks like a dupe, and get em to check. And Taco could use it too!--
Blue SSL
Back in the late 90's, when I was still doing PC service work for folks, I had a pretty wild experience in terms of recovery. I ran into this cab driver at CompUSA who was in the process of picking up a whole bunch of power cords and other basic accessories. We got to talking, and he said he was new to computers, and had just gotten a whole bunch of hardware from the local swap meet.
We talked a while longer, and he ended up agreeing to pay my hourly rate to look the machines over, clean them up, and wipe the drives so he could use 'em. What he had was a full-tower Pentium 166 (big stuff back then), and a smaller external drive that had a security key lock on it.
So, I vacuum the system's guts (had a ton of dust-bunnies in there), reseat the memory, and fire it up. It boots into Win95. First thing I notice is a TON of very high-end graphics-manipulation and publishing software installed, including packages like Adobe PageMaker, a full version of Acrobat, PhotoShop, etc. There was also the (then) current version of Visual Basic and Visual C (both Enterprise-class editions).
This set off some alarm bells in my head. The combined software on that system was worth at least as much as the hardware. I started digging a bit deeper. I found a couple of Word documents (yes, the system had a full version of MS Office and MS Exchange on it as well) with the name of a graphics-and-advertising company barely 30 miles away.
I called said company, and got hold of the admin assistant for the programmer who's name was all over the system. Turns out that the entirety of what that cabbie had delivered to me had all been stolen in a burglary the same day it showed up at the swap meet!
You can probably guess the rest. The cabbie, once he learned what was going on, and not wanting any trouble with the King County Sheriffs, agreed to just leave the equipment with me in return for anonymity. The system, as it turned out, belonged to one of their senior developer/programmers who, along with their system, had lost about seven years worth of intense work.
The company involved was so delighted to get everything back intact (yep, every byte of that work was recovered) that they not only paid me for my time involved in cleaning the stuff up, but they also gave me a $50.00 certificate for one of the best restaurants in town. My wife and I had a nice dinner with that one.
The moral of the story: Pay VERY close attention to what may be left on any hard drive or system you get, and follow your instincts if you're the least bit suspicious! You could end up saving someone a ton of grief and lost hours.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Whenever a PC changed hands, the IT folks did a complete 100% wipe on the hard drive before installing an image, but not before scanning the drive for security violations. I don't know what their disposition policy was, but it's a safe bet that dead media was definitely not going to be recovered.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I worked for a professor doing workstudy for about three years who consistantly sexually harassed me - looking down shirt, trying to ask me to spend a weekend in the city with him, etc. One day while doing some word processing I happened upon a file with a few pieces of poetry. One was about the arrogance of american women, and another was about impotence. That almost made up for having to deal with his idiocy for all that time. I debated for a while printing them out and then using the departmental photocopier and posting them all around campus. I should have done that as a going away present to myself.