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?"
This was posted before here.
I found a bunch of Spice Girl stuff (3GB+) on my friends 'broken' hard drive he gave me... I was sorta afraid when I saw that, really makes me wonder about him...
How else can we explain how the editors are finding these old stories?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I found archives of old Slashdot stories and resubmitted them.
Common sense is what tells you the world is flat.
Yikes!
/. stories...
Looks like someone must have gotten ahold of CmdrTaco's recently discarded hard drive and recovered the links to old
You'd think Taco would have at least used some sort of freespace wiping utility!
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Well I bought a laptop back in the day...a p166 toshiba which to this day has enough power to word process...surf the internet, but unfortunately the battery and cdrom both died.
Now when I bought it I thought it was kinda wierd...it was in like a crayola theme and had lots of kids games on it and stuff, but the guy I got it from said it was his kids. So I am about to format it, since it was full of junk and the little 2 gig hd was filled, when all of a sudden what do i discover but a c:\private\ dir!!!
So...as any good person does I formatted without looking at it. *cough*
Turns out daddy had a gay pron fetish!
After being disgusted by this, especially since it was on his KIDS computer, I formatted and lived happily ever after.
Now, if someone was to buy the laptop from me they would find plenty of straight pron on it!!!
(and i just might leave it there as a little present)
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
I'm seriously considering blocking CmdrTaco from the list of people whose stories I see. If you look back over the list of duplicates, nearly all of them are Taco's.
Psssst, Taco. A hint for ya: just because you started the site doesn't absolve you of the duty of looking at it once in a while. Say, before you click "Submit."
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Methinks someone else could do with a course in basic UNIX commandline tools... How about "grep" for instance?
^]:wq!^M
You mean I can find GOOD STUFF on those old HDs if i don't wipe em first? Shit, I've been missing out. Damn my utter lack of curiosity.
What Would Satan Do?
WWII is over and Soviet Russia ceased to exist ...
Come on Taco, do you ever read your own site?
I see duplicates. They're everywhere - they don't even know they're duplicates...
-Adam
Some MIT kid in the future is going to stumble across the Slashdot hard drives and go "God Damn they posted Duplicates alot."
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
Arrgh, I saw the cat pass twice... Errr, the post twice ! :-)
:-)
(Note to moderator : this is a pityful attempt at humor, to get my karma from bad to neutral, since my first 2 posts were rated -1 and ever since I can't post that will get read, and my two other posts weren't offensive, so I deserve better).
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.
Check out the photoshop that's going on over at Fark: unlikely Slashdot articles.
Please! If a story is a dupe, so what? Here's a thought. Don't read it. Don't even comment. Don't even "just say no". (OK, so that was several thoughts ;-)
Get outside, breathe the fresh air, and quit trying to come up with clever quotes that express your angst over a duplicate/semi-duplicate story.</RANT>
SET MODE KarmaTracking=ON
SET MODE ModeratorSuckup=ON
The preceding comment has been reviewed and declared to be compliant with HIPPA Phase II regulations.
Again a story that has been posted a little while ago. I won't rant about reading your own website or getting decent editors... not this time.
:)
But I wouldn't be surprised if one of the factors for the attention BBC gives to this project is the fact that is has been on Slashdot.
Nice circle
There have to be 20 dupes about the fact that this is a dupe. Of course, I'm guessing this has already been pointed out...
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Well, I for one didn't get around to posting on the first run :)
I once bought a HD from a storefront computer shop. Everything had been deleted, but it was so easy to undelete that I couldn't resist -- there were dozens of documents from a criminal law practice specializing in parole related procedures. Nothing terribly interesting, but definitely another lesson in the pitfalls of attorney-client privilege in the electronic age...
who's moderating the meta-moderators?
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?
while cat garbage garbage ; do true ; done | dd bs=100k of=/dev/hdaX
You could put it on a floppy Linux distribution and sell it to windows users who want to wipe their disks .. $20 a pop!
(or better yet -- a bootable CD business card so you could include the source).
Just don't let your 5 year old nephew get hold of it -- or else!
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Every other poster has managed to stay within the confines of this discussion, which is clearly about Duplicate stories being posted to Slashdot.
I don't think it's fair to them, or the rest of the readers, if this post doesn't get modded down to -1 Offtopic.
However, this part --
is not a duplicate. I think the question would better fit into the Ask Slashdot section, but oh wellPerhaps somebody was just trying to start up a discussion about things that have been left on harddrives, not about how many times we can call it a dup.
Only 15?
But it doesn't matter of course because I use crypto-loop for exactly these reasons.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
"Tuesday 8th of February 1997, Tony is pissing me off today, he's already taken 4 coffee breaks, sticking me with the rest of the work, note to self report to boss. Julie is looking rather sexy today, comment to her at lunch about lovely blouse."
It got spicy here and there and read like a badly written journal, still it was great to read about the daily intricate moments that one of my ex collegues had felt.
Errr Id better not tell this one.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Think of it as an opportunity for even the dimmest of slashdotters to appear funny - go grabbing the funniest comments from the original story! For example:
"Luckily for me, my Ebay'd hard drives are safe: I only sell broken ones."
"Two MIT grad students bought used drives from eBay and secondhand computer stores.
Don't I feel inferior. I've done the same with used HD's in the past and I only have a HS edumacation."
"Your old HD is safe, I can get creditcard numbers faster on kazaa."
"Was it Pete Townshend's drive?"
"How do I destroy a HD? I just wait for my warranty to run out - it becomes unreadable shortly thereafter!"
One time when I came home from work, there was a PC by the dumpster at our apartment complex. I brought it in to harvest it for parts (never can have enough screws), and i decided to boot it up first to see what it was. Low end pentium, like a 75mhz. 8megs of ram. Ran DOS and Win 3.11.
Turned out the machine used to be a Kiosk machine at a deli counter at a local grocery store. There wasnt TOO much of interest on it, but there was a huge list of peoples meat and cheese orders.
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.
should be
dd if=/dev/urandom bs=100k count=100 of=garbage
(I was sure that I'd fixed that)
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
George, is that you?
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
- The Allies win the war!
- Einstein Dies!
- Korea is a stalemate!
- Al Gore invents the Internet!
Trolling is a art,
From the hasn't-anyone-heard-off dept
Slashdotdotdotdotdotdot.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
And duplicate articles are the black cat.
Something has 'changed' - watch out guys!
...News at 11, and 11:30, it seems.
Before you sell a computer, wipe the damn hard drive! Don't just reformat - do a low-level reformat and have it overwritten with zeros. If you're really worried, use PGP to do it. Then re-install the system and whatever else belongs there.
If you know somebody who's selling/giving away a computer, make sure they know that the Trash/Recycle Bin doesn't really delete anything.
Seeing as this story is completely redundant, wouldn't all those posts being moderated as such be *on* topic? :)
Project Steve
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.
C:dir
HDMINING.TXT
CMDTACO.TXT
CBYNEAL.TXT
ASCIPR0N.TXT
FLEXDISP.TXT
MSSUXORS.TXT
SDVERTSE.TXT
IHATETRL.TXT
OSXROCKS.TXT
RPOSTALL.CGI
SLASH.HTM
VOLUME SLASDT
20030023 bytes free 34789287 bytes used
C:
[Re: BBC] Sometimes it takes longer for the news to make it to that side of the pond.
hasn't-anyone-heard-of-deja-vu
Doesn't Taco actually read his own site anymore? Maybe there's should be a utility for scrubbing embarassing duplicate stories from Slashdot. ;-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Since all the hard drive manufacturers that I've dealt with (Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, etc.) all make you jump through hoops to find the right utilities for various drives, there's an easy way to do a low-level and fix the problem:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX# bs=1k
Using this with Toms RTBT, you've got a very handy utility floppy.
Knowing this could cause legal trouble, I quickly got on the phone and called the hospital. They said that they thought the system was clean, and that I should destroy any data on the drive. I then called my lawyer. After a small consulting fee (about $60) he informed me that I shouldn't have anything to worry about, so long as I did as the hospital asked, and destroyed all copies of the records. And I did, and that was the first time I ever felt good about losing data!
(Posting anonymously, in case any other slashdotters get any funny ideas... :)
YOU are posting in this thread? Following your own advice you should be outside breathing fresh air. Tsk tsk ;-)
Sheesh, you'd think the 'nerds' would pay attention to the details. But then, you are not really nerds. Are you?
throw the baby out. The bathwater is cold
in a dumpster.
A friend went back to claim them, this is what he ended up with:
2 HP Server class machines PIII 450Mhz good working condition once the cigarette ashes were removed.
1 DLT Tape backup
19 New tapes in wrapper and cleaning kit
Cables and other accessories.
The machines were used by a financial company. Everything worked and booted up. NT server loaded and ready....
We shut them down and wiped everything. Pretty scary actually, who knows what was on those machines!
Blogging because I can...
Dear lord, that poor bastard must've been subject to so many Simon & Garfunkel jokes.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Preferences|Homepage|Exclude Stories from the Homepage|Topics|Duplicate stories = Ticked
NullPointerException
This story is part of a striped disk array, which is why its content looks similar, but not identical, to the other stripe, which was discovered a week ago.
That said, experts would tell you that the only reliable way to make sure sensitive data doesn't get out is to thermite your drive.
Also, what's the one-line unix command (running MacOS X here).
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
When you use a story written in a foreign paper about a US college...
It MAY have been reported in a US paper first.
Ok?
1. Are you Tony? How many coffee breaks have you had today?
2. Got any nice pictures of Julie?
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
I once used this technique to wipe a disk:
/mnt/mp3/* > /dev/hd1
cat
With DV editing or tv capture cards, it's even easier.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Sure, the story is a dupe... but the original one is why I picked up two computers that were sitting on the curb this morning :-D
How about this story about Congress realizing that patent problems may take away their blackberrys? Who knows, maybe they'll wake up a bit to all that we've been kvetching about for some long...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
When we sorted through his equipment, not only did he have volumes of she-male pr0n, but he had been subscribed to she-male pr0n emailing lists using his company email account.
It certainly explained his freaky looking "girlfriend".
:)
I very recently purchased a hard drive off of Ebay for a friend that had at least 12 modern games installed, all with cracks and no-CD patches applied. Jedi Knight 2, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2003, Civilization, you name it, this guy had it. We had tons of fun for a while (hell, I imaged the hard drive right away :-) )
The strangest most surreal thing found so far is a copy of the same story on Slashdot.org from a few days ago.
Help fight continental drift.
strangest thing i've left on a hard drive? Windows ME ! :p
(goes back and checks spelling)
Oh, MORALS. Silly Moral...I mean mortal.
On topic, however, considering what some people do with their neighbors looking in their trashcan wouldn't reveal any surprises. Truth is if you don't want people to know what you've done either a: don't do it or b: don't give it away. Just don't trust anyone else to treat you right.
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
15:08 21 January 03
At a worldwide conference held in Atlanta, GA, leading scientists and publishers agreed on a new measurement unit to describe the common phenomenon of news stories getting published repeatedly on internet news sites.
1 Taco = 3 dpm (dupes per minute)
After a lengthy discussion we eventually agreed to name the new unit after "CmdrTaco", founder of the famous web site Slashdot. We are really happy now, this has been bothering us since the beginning of the internet. said Sag. S. Nochmal, German publisher and chairman of the convention.
"CmdrTaco" himself was unavailable for comment. He was last seen yelling "Eternal fame" and "must write automatic re-post script now."
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
Lots of good stuff.
I picked up a half a dozen or so old Pentium computers for dirt at the Arthur Andersen asset auction in DC last year. You know, the guys who audited Enron.
I figured they'd have removed the drives. Nope! Blanked them? Nope! In several cases, the PCs' former users had left only a few megs free on the 1.2 gig drives.
Now, I wouldn't know an incriminating document if hit me in the ass. Nevertheless, if my company's books were audited by Arthur Andersen, I'd be pissed off that they didn't clear those drives.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I inherited some PC's at one site I support. One such PC had the previous IT contractor's personal Hotmail folder downloaded to Outlook Express. I had no idea whose mail this was, so I had to look at it (I was about to wipe and reinstall Windows to get rid of IPX/SPX). It was, ah, personal mail... indeed. The contractor... their spouse... a third party.... I wiped it and kept my mouth shut. Don't trashtalk competitors; it's unprofessional. :)
Secure Harddisk Eraser is a Linux floppy that overwrites the HD several times with different patterns. Just boot from the floppy, wait 60 seconds and the harddisk will start to erase.
The homepage
Oh yes, I've posted on this before, but that doesn't seem to matter...
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Taco posts a dupe, and those that get in early pointing it out get Karma, those that point out the dupes pointing out the dupe get some Karma, and those who point out the dupes pointing out the dupes pointing out the dupes get some karma, but if you get into the pyramid too late, you get screwed with -1 Redundant.
paintball
My mum recently asked me how they could reliably destroy all the data on a hard disk they are throwing away. I suggested baking it in the oven for a while. Does anyone know what temperature would be good and for how long? Or suggest an alternative that is cheap, easy and 100% effective?
no message
Your monitor is staring at you.
I just thought I'd share a story. When I was a kid (like 15-ish, I guess), I worked at a local computer shop repairing people's PCs... upgrades, installs, that sort of thing. Being concious of the respect one must give to people's privacy, I never really looked into people's Internet caches, data directories, etc., until one day when I, for the purposes of what I was doing, was forced to...
Now this machine, if I remember correctly, was a "family" PC.. games for the kids, productivity software (I think it was used to run a small business as well), lots of garishly colored Win95 Plus! themes, etc. And there was porn in the cache...
Strange porn...
Involving animals...
And leather...
And other things I don't care to remember!
No Joke. *shudder* Who knows how normal I would have turned out if I had never seen that stuff? Being a bit shocked and embarassed, I never mentioned it to the customer... though I probably should have said something...? *shrug*
"Sic transeunt omnia."
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
> George, is that you?
Nope.
Artoo Detoo, is that you?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I bought a bunch of SS20s which once belonged to a major bank, I won't name names so Morgan Stanley don't need to worry that I have tons of data belonging to their customers, which they left incompetantly left on these machines.
Lucky for this un-named bank that I am an honest kind of guy and llfed the drives without looking.
Economic Left/Right: -0.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.69
AFAIK, the only way to completely erase everything from a hard disk is to smash it into little pieces with a hammer. Even after a format data is accessable, if you know how to get it.
My company does work for the Ministry of Defence in the UK, if we have to swap out a NIC, for example, they won't release the dead card for at least two weeks so that any residual charge dissipates, otherwise information can be gleaned from the chips on the card!
-----------------------
Moderator's essentials
"Offtopic" mod seems to be used improperly more often than not.
very true indeed.
This whole little subdiscussion is very likely to get moderated as offtopic, whereas the only consistent topic in the entire comments is the fact that it's a dupe, which is offtopic.
The whole issue basically comes down to wether slashdot is a "discussion site" or an "information site based on comments". If the main purpose of slashdot is to create a vast and useful archive of comments that can enlighten a visitor seraching for info on a "news for nerd" subject, then indeed we are offtopic. If on the other hand, slashdot is a forum in which nerds can discuss anything they consider nerdstuff, almost everything is on topic !
I suppose the best way is something in between, but right now, I have the impression the balance is shifted way to much towards the first type. Plus, as many of us have said, the biggest problem is the fact that due to the recursive nature of the problem, the problem itself can't be discussed on slashdot.
And that attitude is what we usually call censorship. Slashdot is more and more becoming a selfcensoring community. I've tried to find analogies in the real world, but fail to see one so far. The only thing I'm sure of, is that it is not a GoodThing(tm)
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
AFAIK, the only way to completely erase everything from a hard disk is to smash it into little pieces with a hammer. Even after a format data is accessable, if you know how to get it.
Even after smashing it with a hammer, I wouldn't be surprised if the right people with the right equipment (tunneling scanning electron microscope possibly) could still read it. I recall a few years back some kiddy pr0n guy erased a bunch of his floppy disks with a magnet, then cut them up with scissors, and the FBI still managed to retrieve enough data to prosecute him.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Well, here's what we do around these parts with old hard drives....take em up to the range and put a clip of .762 into each one. (or .223, depends on whether the AK or the AR15 is out that day)
I promise you, you will NOT have to worry about someone getting your data after that.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
On a mac SE/30 from Salvation Army I found intimate IM's between two lesbians.
mmm.. cinemaxy
>who knows what was on those machines!
:)
Well, nobody does now! You people and your morals. You could have at least lied and told me it was something juicy.
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
True story: some years back my wife was doing web design for various clients, one of whom had a graphic artist on staff, who gave her a Mac 100M Zip disk that supposedly had some nice artwork on it for my wife to put on the client's web site.
But the disk appeared to be completely empty, so my wife gave it to me to try to recover the missing files.
No problem under Linux...I recovered a full 100 megabytes of files...but they were all kinky porn!!!
We decided to let the guy off easy and didn't tell his employers what he was doing with company computers and media, but my wife was always a bit leery of working with that guy after that.
(Yes, I did of course save the more, ah, artistic images for, um, later personal, uh, research. ;-)
This kind of amusing leftovers on media is probably extremely common, but most people don't have any motivation to pry around into deleted files. As I recall, this particular disk just had a bit of file system damage that made it appear empty at first, rather than literally having deleted files, so file system repair was enough to get all of the originals back.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
It's a dupe, and in other news - UFO stands for UNIDENTIFIED flying object. I don't mind duplicate stories, of which we see one or two occasionally, but 300 people posting the same comment in a row... How hypocritical can you get?
Time to look for giant magnets on ebay also.
Table-ized A.I.
Let the users do it. When an admin approves and posts a story, it must first be screened by the community. Anyone with sufficiently positive karma can vote on the pending stories, and if a certain story has enough votes marking it as a dupe, the admins are notified and it isn't posted without a manual override.
It could be a selection right below the metamoderation - "Review Pending Stories". Assuming it waits for 100 votes before deciding what to do, this would only delay the posting process by a few minutes, and it'd make for a much better Slashdot.
Josh Woodward
phew... a friend of mine got a brand new computer, with a zero meter hard disk. And he got loads and loads of data on it. Some coy called Microsoft is selling used disks as new. And ppl tell me they are earning a lot of money too.
... hee2 is stuck under the bed.
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
Oh, so we're talking about hard disks?
i see dead files
...a Slashdot reader has LEFT on a hard drive? Oh, that's easy! It would have to be several gigabytes of Young Tentacle Rape Hentai, judging from some of the comments I've read here over the past few months.
The average IQ seems to be taking a plunge at /. and its Almost getting to be a waste of time reading replys.
This IS NOT a repeat of the other story
THIS ONE ask readers what THEY have found on old drives, not what the MIT gang found.
Duh.......
> Apperantly, the previous owner was your average college drunkard and basically rapped this girl.
.
Gimmee a beat, Irwin . .
Hey, woman, I'm talkin to you,
If you don't gimme any lovin', then we're thru!
So I drink a lot of beer, so I drink a lot of whiskey,
You got no cause to be cold when I'm feelin' frisky --
So I'm standing here right outside yo' door,
And I'll keep poppin' these rhymes at cha, even though I'm a bore.
Speaking of all this data recovery, I began to think. And what did i think of, you might ask. How would I retrieve deleted data? I have absolutly no clue how to. How would YOU suggest?
Here is my theory about how the same article appears on slashdot multiple times.
First, the article appears on slashdot. It is very interesting.
Because the article appears on slashdot, it then appears elsewhere like CNet, CNN, etc. (Please no flames for beginning a sentence with a conjunction.)
Now that the news item, especially one like this, appears everywhere, now even the BBC, it gets noticed by editors, submitted, and accpeted in an expidited manner, because an editor submits it the second (third, fourth) time.
However, this is purely speculative on my part.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
I'd have to say the strangest thing I ever found was on a 486 someone gave me. There were seemingly endless folders eached named, and together forming a word in a sentence. Jack/and/jill/went/up/a/hill as an example. It was almost like the person was trying to write a book like that, like they didn't know about word processors or something.
There is no spork.
Namaste
Floppy disk data is many orders of magnitude less dense than a hard drive, let alone a modern one.
I mean, 200 GB in three platters these days. That's about 138,888 floppy disks, in about the surface area of 6 floppies. That's 23 thousand times more dense.
I've never found any accounts on the web of anyone doing magnetic analysis of platter surfaces with modern hard disk, with any amount of equipment, only seen some proposed methods in papers, and even then, they admit it would take weeks to get more than a few kilobytes.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Hey, maybe it is better not knowing. We imagine all kinds of good stuff, truth is likely to be something a lot more boring...
I am not sure morals had anything to do with it. It was liability and risk to be sure. We worked in the same building as the other company did.
Either way, I know somebody very happy right now with two machines and nice DLT backup for nothing but a little work (and smell!)
Blogging because I can...
I once received a handful of 486 machines from Comerica bank. They were throwing the old out and my uncle told me to grab em before they hit the garbage. Amazingly enough I found out that each one contained customer account information. Since I never intended a life on petty crime I erased the disks, but stuff like that has to make you wonder.
Any drive I sell or put up on an auction, I make sure I do one or all of these things. Any of these will ensure the data can not be retreived from the drive.
I drop it, on the floor, a few times.
Open the unit up and pour cement/paint inside.
Use a paperclip and touch random metal parts together
Soak it in water for 30 minutes
Put it in the microwave for 30 seconds
Put it in water and microwave for 30 seconds
Play football with it
Attached it to your car muffler for a day or two
Take a shower with it
Take a bath with it
Give it to a child, for a crib toy, for a week
Drop it into the shitter while taking a dump!
Use it as a freezz-bee
Put it in the mover, for a few hours, at max
I am sure you can think of more exciting way to ensure data cleaning. If so, please add to this list!!
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
Dude, when I was 4 I was wondering why the world looked round, when everyone else said it looked flat.
ACK.
Several years ago i bought a huge box of used floppy disks. They were all supposed to be erased but instead it was tons of software with another blank label on the top of it. Over 90% of the floppies were original diskettes and I ended up with an entire new suite of corel and lotus apps.
Fuck you, you no talent assclown! Butterscotch rules! Vanilla sucks! Where did you go to school, SEARS? Anyone who would say that about butterscotch clearly has Oedipal issues, do you kiss you mother with that mouth? Probably, french kiss. French VANILLA, that is!!!!
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Jesus loves you, I think you suck
A couple years ago my company purchased some computers from a defunct Psych clinic. There were records for a large number of government and business heavyweights in my area. Enough to do some serious damage. (and get in serious sh!znit)
The drives were low leveled, blasted, etc. Too bad. It would have been good bedtime reading. (morals suck)
Actually, I got it for free. The guy thought it had only about 100 MB, while in fact it was a 1 GB+ SCSI drive. The fact was that it had NetWare (3.11 I think) installed, which is installed mostly on a separate, NetWare partition, which this guy didn't apparently notice.
Sigged!
I had a drive come to me, work for about 48 hours (just long enough for me to load all my data on it) and then had a head crash. Of course, I was able to return the drive for a replacement, but not before a buddy of mine at a speaker manufacturing plant demagnitized it for me :) Find something on that, MIT boy!
Jeff
At least it wasn't an article submitted like:
:p
According to this article posted on slashdot, HP released some.......
I'd like to see if something like that can slip through the filters
Hey,
never can have enough screws
You got that right.
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
We didn't bother with wiping the drives.
After the end of a project or if a drive went bad, the drive platter was physically removed from the hd, smashed and then finally burned!
( Ob. M.P. quote : "burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp" )
Better than what they used to do: destroy the ENTIRE PC too!
I have one for ya'all...
I was working at a small local computer shop and one day a machine comes in for service. If I remember the guy wanted a new drive put in because he ever so brilliantly deduced that the old one was not working.
OK no prob...
After looking into the old one I saw his stash of pr0n. I was bored, so I rummaged through it...
Hmmmm he likes teens. OK it looks like poloroids on a flatbed scanner. Young teens.
sicko...
The next day he came in to pick up his box, so I carried it out to him and that is when I saw her. I froze, jaw on the ground. I just stood there not knowing what to do... It was his DAUGHTER!
After he left I notified my boss and stopped looking through "bad" or "old" hard drives for some time.
...wiping the free space on a drive is built into the OS.
/w:[path]
cipher
where [path]= any location on the drive in question.
This tool doesn't delete files that are present, but simply clears space already marked as "empty". It was included to augment the functionality of EFS. If you encrypt a file, you don't want vestiges of the file from before you encrypted it lingering.
"My God, this must be a truly remarkable corn chip, to be so widely and confidently touted."
We got a couple of used Sun A1000 Disk Arrays in. When we hooked everything up I looked if I could find any file systems on it, and lo and behold I did. We mounted them and found two complete oracle DBs on it. The DBA was even able to open them up and we were able to look into it.
I never understand why people don't scrub disks, Sun even has a document on this on their blueprints website.
M.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
A roommate of mine once worked at the Berkeley admissions office. Once, he showed up with a stack of ~15 floppies that he said were placed in the trash bin and were completely clean and usable when he tried them. Noticing a cryptic sticker with some numbers and the letters "ETS" on it, I got him to let me take a look at them. Took a raw disk dump. Hmm. Looks like ascii-ish data, as if from a flat database file, unencrypted. And hey, here're names... addresses... social security numbers... and a few more odd 4-digit numbers. about 30 minutes later, having figured out where the fields are, it dawns upon me that i had come upon the ETS test records (SAT I/SAT II) for the '97-'98 incoming applicant class at berkeley (some of the '96-'97 data too). Scarily enough, this also included DOB, SSN, addr, phone number, etc. Apparently the people in charge of processing the data did a quickformat or something and threw the disks right out thinking they're clean.
The data has since been destroyed for good, but not until after I spent weeks drooling about the hypothetical possibilities that this could've yielded =)
// zyqqh
This is what I *always* leave on my old hard drives, yes I know the syntax isn't correct, it isn't supposed to be completely correct, it's just supposed to be semi-easy to understand for whoever gets my hard drive. It's a file name PlansForWorldDomination.sh and here's what it contains.. #!/bin/bash # Looking at MY files are you?! # Tsk.. Tsk.. like my plans for world domination # would be plaintext.. # The REAL ones are encrypted. : "check" if intruder > 0 "remove" goto "check" # This moves the intruder who dared to look at my # files to death row.. : "remove" mv -Rf /usr/annoyingintruder /usr/local/deathrow
goto "check"
# This checks the time, and if it's after or #equal to 12:00 it
# removes everyone on death row
: "time"
TIME=getthetime
if TIME > 11:59 goto "nightnight"
goto "time"
: "nightnight"
echo Nice knowing ya..
mv -Rf /usr/local/deathrow/ /dev/null/
goto "check"
Pretty funny, indeed. But...
Pictures of a web page? C'mon, couldn't they save quite a bit of work, and bandwidth, by just writing their stuff in HTML, instead of photoshopping it? I think it was JWZ who once said something like "the web is full of pictures of text, which is kinda sad."
And yes, I do realize the irony of this being the first impression I got from their comments.
My brother works at a marketing research company. They value thier data so much that instead of selling off thier old computers, they physically destroy them.
Actually, when I am asked to retire a system, it is my job to "snoop through the files" and insure nothing of value is lost, prior to scrubbing the disk drives. So, failure to snoop can also be grounds for dismissal.
If I was confronted with something equivalent to this, obviously contrived, situation, I would scrub the drives, without comment, and move on. The only time I would report something is if it would impact on the corporation. For example. correspondance related to misuse of corporate IP would be reported immediately.
Sakshale
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.
My computer crashed a few weeks ago, with years worth of school work and mp3s on it. In the process of trying to recover it I accidentally... started reformating. Yes, I know, I'm an idiot. It only got to about 2% before I shut it off. Anyway, how do I retrieve the data on the disk? Can I send it somewhere? Can I do it myself? How? How much will it cost?
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
I think time has arrived for techices to tell the general public and the companies they work for to wipe their drives before disposing or giving them away. People should be told to encrypt sensitive info and wipe drives. Heck, it should even come w/ the computer manuals IMO with the necessary software.
I think it just goes to show how much people depend on their computers for too many things. Only a matter of 10 years ago, people had financial information, documents, addresses and contacts and any other personal information under lock and key in a filing cabintet.
As long as someone doesn't snoop through their garbage bags, someone would probably not want to go to the local garbage dump to get personal information. Now many simply give old, working hard drives to charitable organizations or friends w/o even reformatting them. In the age of identity theft, I think its safe to say that most in the general public shred paper documents before disposal.
Never having dealt with a Mac before, I did some research and managed to reset the BIOS. Boom, there's the hard drive with some small local publishing company's (think brochures & pamphlets) data on it.
I called him over and he flipped when he saw the contents. As it so happens, he worked a second job at this same publishing company!
Next day, he goes in tells his boss he's got their computer. She tells him they reported it stolen and got a new one with the insurance compensation - and here's some money to keep it hush-hush.
To this day, I don't know if the Mac was stolen from the company or not but definitely a weird situation.
On a GNU system, just "shred
In all seriousness, it would do Slashdot a world of good if "Boobies" was under the topics menu.
Soviet Russia doesn't exist anymore? well then..
In Soviet Russia, *YOU* cease to exist.
why? Because the hard drives wipe YOU!!
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
You, sir, have reposted my comment, without so much as reading it. This should be evident from the bullets beneath it. That was a very naughty thing to do, and I request that you immediately cease and desist.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
That would mean deleting the story. Slashdot runs on MySQL. When you delete a row from a table in a MySQL database, that row's now empty slot cannot be reused until you do the command "OPTIMIZE TABLE whatever". Unfortunately, the table is locked during this time. So deleting a story would waste DB space which couldn't be regained until (annual?) maintenance.
In addition to this, you'd also lose all the comments which have been posted with the dupe.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
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.
I think that this just says it all. I also think boobies should be one of the topics, CmdrTaco's wife wouldn't like that though, and they wouldn't get to make icky geek sex ;P
That Anonymous Coward story is duplicated a lot too. Must be a troll account for CmdrTaco
I used to buy "dead" hard drives from a local retailer. Drives he pulled from systems that were supposedly dead drives.
Most interesting find: A full copy of AutoCAD 12, with several part prints for automotive components for GM. Hard drive appeared to be pulled from a system belonging to Eaton Automotive. When I got it , it didn't spin up. One quick slam to the desk got it spinning (remember the old Conner 40 meg drives). It wasn't like I was concerned about breaking the drive - it was already "dead" when I got it.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Yep. Robert Heinlein. Time Enough For Love, in fact.
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
I picked up a HDD that had a full installed OS running HURD /me ducks
Well, since this discussion was going no where... at least I didn't mention the lovely Ms. Portman - DOH!
Anyway, how do I retrieve the data on the disk? Can I send it somewhere?
Yes, there are a number of companies that specialize in this (google for "data recovery" or the like)--but it's not cheap: data recovery for an entire drive can easily run into the thousands of dollars.
Can I do it myself? How?
Yes, if you have the technical knowledge and a lot of time on your hands. You'll essentially be searching for a needle (your data) in a gigantic haystack (the disk), and since files are often scattered across several parts of the disk you may not be able to recover them completely. The actual procedure varies depending on the filesystem type, but in general you have to search the raw disk image for phrases or strings of bytes that were in a particular file you're looking for, and then look before and after that location to see how much of your file is stored there. As searching an entire hard disk takes time, and you have to go through this process (possibly multiple times) for each file, this isn't really practical for recovering more than a few important files.
One other thing you should investigate is how much of your data you can reconstruct from another source. As always, backups are the number one option, but even if you don't have a full backup of your disk, some of your data might still be saved in other locations. For example, did you save any of your schoolwork on floppy disks to take to school? If so, you can restore that data without having to search the hard disk for it. Did you save any data on the school computers? Might your instructors have copies of your work? Alternatively, how much of the lost data did you actually write, and how much is automatically generated by a program? For example, if you have the source code to a program, you don't need to try and recover the executable as well--you can just recompile it.
As an anecdote, a bug in a script I wrote recently ended up doing an "rm -rf /" on my server at home. The only backup I had was 10 months old, but since it was a server system, it was fairly simple to just reinstall Linux and restore the few actual data files (logs, etc.) from the backup. In the end, all I ended up losing was 10 months' worth of logs and about half a day's worth of spooled mail.
It's a wonderful story because it grabs the imagination so well, unlike other geek stories we picture the sense of adventure, curiosity, opportunity and pressure of rumaging though some skip for sensitive data. Then there's the element of luck in the stories. Interest in luck makes so many things popular.
There's no limit to what you _might_ find. You could base a film on it. It's a revelation in Keano Reeves' life when he discovers a letter from the Queen of England to Hitler during the 2nd world war, then realises that governments all over the world are controlled not by people but stratigically planted by aliens in a bid to mine our lives as a model to learn from. Desperate he kills himself. It's a short film.
Harddrives aren't the best thing to buy 2nd hand of course.
- rescuing really old HardDrives:
remember the ones that didn't have pins but rather the type that doesn't break so easily? the ones where the connection was protruding PCB with metal on both sides? same type of connector as 5 & 1/4" floppy drives.
- how do we identify a filesystem? Partition flags?
pps Partly Offtopic but a wierd coinsidance of sensitive data:
- was working at a Junk Mail distro warehouse sending out magasines too. I'd ordered a new computer setup, I forget what. My order was a balls-up and it had been delayed etc; all the usual crap you get every now and then. On one of the many thousands of address labels I stuck onto the envelopes I
FOUND THE HOME ADDRESS of the managing director for the company I'd ordered it from. Although I didn't act on it in the end what are the chances of that?
- he lived the otherside of England
- I knew and actually remembered his name from a circular
- I rarely look at the labels on those address labels I came to hate
- I only ordered it a month beforehand
odd.
A blog I run for the wealth
Not to be picky.... They are missing a space in "a lot".
About 10 years ago my boss at the time bought a GRID laptop from an Army auction. Interestingly, there was still the fire control system to an artillery field cannon loaded on the drive. I was surprised as was he.
On more than one occasion an outgoing member of our sales force has returned a laptop with pr0n all over it.
:-)
We once received a CD-ROM of artwork from a client where they accidentally included some nasty hardcore stuff involving farm animals (bonus points - it was sent to a female staff member at our company).
The best one however was from an IT guy at a place I used to work - the company bought IBM laptops in large batches, and the IT guys would provide preconfigured Windows NT4 network install images (using Norton Ghost or similar) for each model (I dual booted and mostly used Red Hat, but the corporate email and expense reporting system was Lotus Domino R4, and the applet client sucked big time
One hapless IT chap released a Norton image where he'd been testing the browser using various, ahem, websites, complete with all the cookies to prove it stored under his NT domain login in WinNT/Profiles/r****
Luckily for him it was a laid back place, and no-one lost any sleep over it.
Come on Taco. I love the site, but is searching previous articles before submitting really that hard?
Lately, we should rename him CmdrDuplicate.
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
I have a bunch of IBM Travelstar drives (for laptops) with potentially a lot good stuff in them; the problem is that most are locked with a hd user password (not a POP or a supervisor pwd). How could I retrieve the password or hack the locked drives?
cheers,
Frank
p.s. you can email info to elfmaloney@yahoo.NOT.ca
(w/o the negative word)
A truth that's told with bad intent, Beats all the lies you can invent. -- William Blake
I agree with your lawyer that you have no problem, and everything is ok.
That'll be $85 (my rates are higher).
Heh. One time I found a laptop in a garbage can at the South Street Seaport in NYC. It was a 486 DX2-50 with 16 megs of ram, VGA active matrix LCD, and onboard SCSI of all things. All in all a nice machine once I wiped off the mustard. Until I found out that the hard drive was riddled with bad blocks and scandisk found more every time I ran it. And of course it's a SCSI disk so $$ to replace. I guess that's why it was in the garbage can.
Oh but what data I DID check out on the hard drive revealed that it had belonged to one of the tour boat companies at the seaport there.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com