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Is Your Banking Information Accidentally On Ebay?
GraWil writes "The Toronto Star is reporting how two Bank of Montreal computers containing thousands, of sensitive customer files were sold to a student who fixes up machines and then resells them on eBay. It seems that the company responsible for scrubbing the disks (Rider Computer Services Ltd.) misfiled the machines in their warehouse and it was assumed they had been erased." It's not the first time this sort of thing has happened.
My take on the whole issue is that somebody caught it and went public with the information soon enough to prevent damage.
Lets hear it for the unsung heroes in life.
They should just get rid of it and save us all alot of headaches while recouping some money from the second hand machine.
My bank is my matress and if it starts talking, then I have other issues to deal with.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Personally, i think that any hard-drive that has been used for that purpose should be securely destroyed instead of being sold. Simon.
Personally I have always been a big fan of physically shredding hard drives which have contained sensitive data. Although the risks associated with re-assembling and recovering wiped data from, say, a RAID 0+1 array is pretty minute, the cost in terms of loss of corporate image outweighs the few hundred bucks made by trading in used disks.
Don't you just love it? If protection of customer information indeed is your number one priority then why the fsck don't you have procedures is place, which make such a blunder outright impossible? And if you do have such procedures in place why don't you enforce them?
Are those PR liars (and what else could such a "chief privacy officer" making such an outragous statement actually be?) all cranked out by the Forked Tongue Institute for Marketing & PR, or what?
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
There is: WIPE.
Seems like this event makes the case for encrypted HDs -- schemes that render data unretrievable without the proper passwords/biometric signatures/magic hardware dongles. The idea that all our personal records are stored in clear text on thousands of HDs and backup tapes at a myriad of institutions is not too pleasant.
As a purchaser/fixer/collector of old computers, I have seen many a file that some prior owner would probably have prefered I not. Although I, personally, have seen nothing of a criminal nature (or of a nature that would allow me to perpetrate a crime) I know others who have found strange files on old computers. Psychotic diary entries that advocated violence, financial records, proprietary engineering data, etc. all have an odd way of being left on HDs of obsolete machines. If a old machine stops working, few people make the effort to fix it in order to erase data. Systems that automatically make the data inaccessible in all but valid/authorized machine states would ensure the protection of the data.
Although any encryption system can be broken, by social engineering at the very least, it would be better if there were at least some barriers between sensitive data and potentially prying eyes.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
A nice old lady I know who was in Britain's MI5 realised after throwing away her computer that it was not wise to leave a hard drive full of sensitive information. She and her son then drove back to the rubbish dump and pelted the hard drive with bricks until it gave in.
yeah -
a damn
shame.
While its fine to scrub hard disk clean of their data when they are working fine, what do you do when the hard disk has bad sectors?
That happened to me 2 years back. A Maxtor HDD went bad. Sent it back to Maxtor, got another one. The replacement turned out to be bad too.
Had to send that one back and got the 3rd HDD.
There was a lot of data on the 1st HDD I sent back to Maxtor.
I checked the Maxtor website for any statements as to what they do with their data but couldn't find anything.
Many people(unless they have 2 computers and know how to deal with IDE pins) will just send the disk to their manufacturers, whether it contains data or not. Scrubbing a disk clean with bad sectors requires you to isolate the bad sectors by partitioning.
First off unless the entire IT department of the bank are complete morons, most financial data is NOT kept on loacl machines but the file server and the main database machines.
I know that the caches and things MAY hold some sensitive data but it's highly unlikely.
Unless the person that used that PC in the bank was also a incompetent boob and say saved a spreadsheet of 200 credit card numbers and information in the local drive (why the hell are you making an insecure document like that?) it's only a mild security breach.
It shakes the confidence of the customers more than anything else.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So this kid buys and repairs machines, but didn't even turn the machine on until long after he'd put it up for sale?
Wow I wish I was as efficient as him...
Thats outrageous, now they have my passwords as well.
What you guys don't use your social security and bank account numbers as passwords?
Most companies who's machines hold sensitive data do retain/destroy the hard drives. You can find plenty of machines on ebay, sold stating 'without hard drive' or 'just requires hard drive'.
If it was law, rather than just good practice, maybe we'd feel a lot safer.
If you look at the article no one appears willing to take the blame for it, from the bank itself to its two subcontractors tasked with verifying that data is indeed gone from hard drives.
I find it appalling that the 'computer security team' sent to this guy's house were told to 'seize' the drives when clearly he was doing them a favour. Though they thanked him later and gave him replacement (presumably blank) drives, fuckups like these should have proper ramifications. Along the lines of dismissals.
Figures it was the Bank of Montreal. Those idiots can't do anything right, from paying their then-CEO too much to stupid online banking to hypocritical ad campaigns in 1996. Losers!
In Googling I came across this, which lists voluntary sector computing activities in Canada supported by the banks. Just think what interesting fundraising activities could have been made possible by this kind of donation...
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Of course not - i put it there
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
I once picked up a PC from a council tip (dump) and that contained full patient record, drug charts, names, addresses, even patient photographs. It was from a local mental institution apparently. In order to prevent this material becoming public they had taken the well thought out step of unplugging the IDE cable. Marvellous. That got formatted and ended up on Ebay. Seems the person responsible was doubley stupid as it seem he was throwing away a high end P2 (this was a fair few years back folks) because the HDD was full. Hey ho!
You don't have to pay for Norton Wipeinfo if you're on Windows.
I'm told that both Scrub and Eraser are pretty good - although I haven't used them.
Both of which are free (in the "don't have to pay any money" sense)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
There are valid reasons for checking out the contents of the HD -- if you think a machine might have been stolen, then finding the prior owner is the right course of action. I know of one dumspter diver who tried to reunite an old PC and its data with its former owner. The former owner was pleased by the honesty of the finder and upset that the HDs had not been wiped as promised by a PC recycling company.
The hardest case that I heard was a used computer buyer that ran across some very disturbed writings on a old machine. Violent written fantasies could have been just someone letting off steam, writing fiction, or a prelude to going postal. Finding potential evidence of a forthcoming crime places a severe ethical burden on the finder of the computer files.
Personally, I don't make a point of snooping and tend to just reformat the HDs of old computers that I buy. This also forestalls the licensing issues with old software on old computers -- that old copy of M$ Office may (or may not) be legal.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Physical destruction of used disk drives is not necessary and could in fact engender a false sense of security. Think about it ..... a "secure disposal company" could bake a drive at curie temperature for 24 hours in an alternating magnetic field of varying frequency, strap a hand-grenade to it and drop it down a disused mineshaft, but how can you be sure it's the same drive, or that they haven't made a backup of its contents? If you wanted to get hold of stuff people wanted rid of, what would be a better front for getting it?
..... there are a lot of things they thought were impossible ..... what if someone finds a way ..... Hell, sooner or later someone is going to come up with a scheme for disposing of the air from meeting rooms where secret conversations have been held. The simple scientific fact is that it takes only one overwrite cycle to make data unreadable. You can prove this to yourself using a disk sector editor, but it should be obvious anyway. If the drive could tell a "1 that used to be a 0" from a "1 that has always been a 1", or a "0 that has always been a 0" from a "0 that used to be a 1" with any degree of reliability, someone would already have used that as a capacity-doubling mechanism! It's possible that there might be some difference detectable with a sensitive analogue circuit, since there is a hysteresis loop and there really are the four states I described above. Two overwrites of opposite polarity will force the magnetic media into a known state. Even so, just one overwrite will give someone a massive headache trying to recover the data, because the "used-to-be" data has an inherently high error rate. It's already hard to tell "X that used to be !X" from "X that always has been X" and if the overwriting data is random enough, then it's hard to work out what was ever meant to be what.
Overwriting the drive using software is more verifiable. You de-network the machine, boot it up from a CD, and can analyse the drive contents before starting a wipe cycle. You switch off and back on to prove there is no cheating. Then you can analyse the drive contents again and be sure they are different. The drive never left the machine, but you can be sure the data left the drive.
Whatever anyone may say, remember these "secure disposal companies" are after your money and don't mind playing on your most groundless fears to get hold of it
dd if=/dev/audio of=/dev/hda might conceivably do a good job on a used drive, if you make sure the gain is turned up nice and high and there is nothing plugged into the sound card. Filtered static and power hum are the nearest you're going to get to true randomness.
My drives are invariably thrashed for as long as they work, then get the magnets removed for use in experiments {and wiped a few times across the platters for good measure}.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
The absolute main security issue was customer data. Not that they would have fancied embezzlement or theft but this was looked upon far less serious then compromising customer data, period.
In the data centers (which you had to physically access in order to query real customer data, safe for the front office and also there it was very restricted what you could look at) you had to go through multiple layers of security and where not permitted to even remove a printout.
Computers where dismanteled and disks shredded, they where never for resale. This was applicable for every last computer from every last branch and office
Now, I agree shit happens. Probably in their case it started with outsourcing such a critical tasks to "ACMEs chep disk blanking operation" in order to save a few bucks. This is not really excusable, but it happens.
But what really gets my blood boiling are statements like the one from that PR bimbo, which are just utter bullshit.
Maybe she should apply for a job at Microsoft to sell "trustworthy computing".
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Sorry, you are all wrong...
a) you have disks silent errors (because error-correcting codes corrected them) that will copy sector data to a reserve sector without notice, that makes your old data inaccessible at software level but readable at controler level
b) you can use high resolution magnetic imagery to recover several rewrites of the same track
c) in my books, a hum is very far from random, it's predictable !!!
Physical destruction is the only reasonably secure solution.
.. are you?
:P
Would have been much easier to just have the program copy the password into the clipboard so you could paste it
CBC Radio 1 had an interview with a security representative from the bank last night on As It Happens. An audio recording of the program is available here. (It's the ninth item of the programme.)
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
As appealing as physical destruction of an HD is, it is not a wise course of action. As with most electonics, HDs contain lead, glass fibers in the circuitboard, and caustic chemicals in the electrolytic capacitors. And I have no idea of the potential toxicity of the materials coating the platters or used in the rare earth magnets in the actuators and motor.
Turning data into dust creates an environmental hazard. Therefore, it's better to send old electronics to an institution that has the tools and procedures for safely recycling/recovering/reprocessing the materials in the HD. Yet we obviously cannot and should not enrtust these companes with our sensitive data. That is why some form of encryption (either in hardware or software) is the solution to making the data unrecoverable.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
-jls
Techno-pagan
Shouldn't customers' private information have at least as much rights as some stupid Brittany Spears song?
Modern hard drives have commands "SECURITY ERASE" and "ENHANCED SECURITY ERASE". Search for those terms and hdparm on google. Also below is a link to the quality of the erasure. Note: these will erase even bad "mapped out" sectors. Enhanced erase will even go off track + and minus which erases the edges. atapwd.zip does regular erase (search).
E ra se%20Article%20for%20IDEMA,%20042502.pdf
http://www.tomcoughlin.com/Techpapers/Secure%20
It's a shame that there isn't a Linux program that does something similar.
Others have mentioned specific utilities, but with almost any bootable CDROM Linux variant you can wipe a disk pretty throroughly as follows. This is for when you're retiring a system and want to overwrite the entire disk, not scrubbing free space on a live system:
This will write pseudo-random data over the hard drive 10 times. To make it happen more times, change '10' to 'N' where N is larger than 10 in the 'seq' command. To use true random data rather than pseudo-random, use /dev/random, but realize it may hang waiting to gain more entropy and, for this use, I'm not sure there is any real advantage in true randomness.
You can also use 'dd' on a live system, writing to a file instead of a partition, and fill up free space on that partition (then delete the file!). This will overwrite data from deleted files, but will not get slack space, which is the particular advantage of using the 'wipe' tool that someone else mentioned. Also, remember only root can fill the filesystem; everyone else gets cut off with some small % free.
Windows users should also realize that with Windows 2000 (um, SP3 I think) and above the EFS tool 'cipher' will allow you to wipe unused disk space, so that you can proactively make sure that deleted files aren't hanging around on disk. This is useful if you want to make sure old files don't accumulate on the hard drive of a working system, especially physically insecure laptops etc. etc. It presumes the NTFS file system, of course.
will overwrite the free space on the C: partition with 0s, then 1s, then random data. I'm not sure if it gets slack space.
Of course, a very slim possibility remains that sophisticated and expensive physical analysis will still recover data from disks wiped in this manner. Unless you've seriously honked off the NSA, however, these should provide sufficient protection for most uses.
Scarey. Humans make mistakes. Security disk cleaning should be done by robot workers run by a robotic management. A huge organization is only as smart as its dumbest employee.
I hope he got back his ebay listing fees.
Bravo to them! A refreshing change from all the stories of corporations responding to security issues by shooting the messenger.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I was consulting at a community bank last spring, helping them getting ready for an IT audit by the FDIC. They were replacing some machines, and I persuaded them to donate the old ones to a local computer group who refurbishes them and places them in schools and non-profits. I could see that their IT policy manual contained nothing about even wiping drives let alone destroying them.
As soon as I got them to my office, I invited the CEO in to see how much customer info his IT department had "donated." He was, of course, shocked. The sad thing is, probably 30 people were involved in that transfer and not one of them had the slightest clue. Another said thing is that the donation fiasco was just one of hundreds of examples of failure to adequately protect the privacy of customer information.
The good news is that the FDIC is taking customer data security very serious and is coming down hard on breaches and potential problems during their IT audits and their Safety and Soundness audits. So maybe it will get better. Except we are talking about humans...
computerlady - a brand new Slash-daughter - alone, but no longer invisible, in the
Has anybody stopped to thank the kid that let the bank know? It is comforting to know that there are still a handful of people out there who are still honest.
Just my humble opinion,
SirLantos
The flying hamster of DOOM rains coconuts on your pitiful city.
Gov't employees, military personnel and law enforcement in sensitive areas have to go through a background check.
This begs the question, what sort of background checks are performed on the technicians fixing the computers? And what sort of computer security experience do they have?
I would at least expect a "student" not be employed in this type of position. Give it only to a qualified full-time employee w/ good compensation and benefits - that in itself should be a deterrent.
We used to destroy HHD by letting the techs(me) go apeshit on them with a hammer, then some sandpapaer, then my supervisor would litereally wake someof them home for target practice with his .45.
THey now require the disks to be physically shredded, but i think we came pretty damn close.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
And I get paid under $20K/year to wipe the drives for a major U.S. bank. The guy before me let hundreds of machines full of customer and bank info out to various schools, when I found out I had to travel all over the state wiping out computers, but who knows what made it out before I got to them.
When it boils down to it, these are ancient machines (mostly P166s and wiping a drive takes HOURS on them, and it ain't pretty work, it's dirty warehouse work and lots of heavy lifting. Nobody want's to pay professsionals $75/hr to wipe machines that stopped returning-on-investment years ago.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Since the Bank is responsible to Canadians for how it uses our information, why didn't it just scrub the disks in house, even something like format c:
then send the box to the outsourcers?
If this keeps happening, you bet Canadian Bank Law will mandate they do their own scrubbing...
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
sometimes it ends up on there from individual users' stupidity too. A friend of mine just bought a 17" powerbook off ebay a few weeks back. I was playing with it and saw that it had this guy's quicken files dating back to like 1997. It had U of Maine school/financial aid records. It had all kinds of personal documents on there. It would be SO easy to steal this guy's identity. There were SSN, DL #, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, addresses, phone numbers, EVERYTHING in one convenient location.
It just boggled my mind that someone could be so stupid as to leave that kind of thing on their computer when they sold it.
I guess there is a reason why my company destroys every computer - Cheaper than deleting the hard disk. They send it thru a smashing machine that produces bits and pieces of the machine on the other end.
The banks should have 0'd or trashed these drives before selling them. I see this type of neglect as soley the responsibility of the bank.
Why? Well, if you hire an accountant and don't double check his work, it's your arse. Why should it be any different with a corporation's responsibility when it comes to guarding customer data?
Personally, I would like to see more laws guarding US. Not slapstick anti-terrorism laws directed at destroying personal privacy, but real laws that protect real people. As we are the source of America's economic might. At the point where citizens don't have money to throw at giants, then the giants won't exist anymore. At least, not inside our borders.
The PHB at the small office where I work bought about 20-30 old Pentium 133 machines at auction. I bought/traded for two of them, since we weren't going to use them all at work. They still had their installs of Win95 with a NetWare client and a few company documents. Nothing very interesting, though. I still have a backup of one of them; maybe I'll look through it some more and see what I can find.
It's an operating system, not a religion.
Banking isn't the only area where this happens. I run a computer recycling biz on the sidelines to donate computers to needy organizations/kids and I have had government agencies give me computers fully loaded with super confidential information..like criminal records, medical histories, psychological profiles, login/passwords for government agencies, the list goes on and on. This is on the state level I have to say but sheesh. At least the federal government usually has the sense to pull the hard drives and erase them the good old fashioned way..with a sledge hammer.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0