Not-So-Clean Hard Drives For Sale

Saeed al-Sahaf writes "The Register is running a story about a security consulting company that as part of a study bought hard drives and laptops on eBay, and then was able to recover highly sensitive data including customer databases, financial information, payroll records, personnel details, login codes, and admin passwords for their secure Intranet site. This is a bit scary considering all of these drives were supposedly formatted and sold for surplus by major companies (although few of us actually use the multiple formatting standards of the DoD). Looks like it's hardly necessary for crooks to get at your private information, although I sure industrial espionage spooks have probably done this for awhile." Shades of the recent post about recovering sensitive contents from swap partitions.

Comments

Wow, I sure do love seeing the same story

[dwaggie]

With a different name and a different consulting company every 3 or 4 months with the 'we found some great stuff on these drives'. Oi vey.

shred /dev/hdX

[sik0fewl]

Not sure if this actually works (don't want to try it out now :), but can't one do shred /dev/hdX to "wipe" a hard drive? I'm sure this would make it quite safe to give away, although I still wouldn't recommend corporations doing so.