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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.

3 of 436 comments (clear)

  1. Can I get my hard drive... by raistphrk · · Score: 0, Troll

    from Scott Richter? I want to find out which credit card he uses to buy the pills to make his girlfriend THANK HIM TON1GHT!@!

    Seriously though. If I could get a dirty hard drive, getting a spammer's drive would be a fun project...as long as I could figure out his favorite personal email address.

  2. Re:Low level it. by DigiShaman · · Score: 1, Troll

    I just hope taking shots (diabetes) doesn't throw their needles in the trash. One prick and your life could be over. I dunno, I guess I just freakout over shit like that. God only knows what you'll find in a dumpster. Last think I want is HIV or some nasty cuts from broken glass or metal shit.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
  3. Re:Eraser (GPL) by bit01 · · Score: 0, Troll

    More like commercial zealotry. Yes, most vendors would like to pretend the license doesn't matter and bury all the nasty stuff in the fine print.

    We here in the real world know that the license is one of the most important characteristics of a program. It can have a major effect on the quality or otherwise of the user experience, including the quality of the program itself.

    When the vendor hides the source, disclaims all liability in the license and provides no realistic mechanism for fixes then for any significant piece of software odds are you're going to have unfixable problems.

    ---

    It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
    It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
    Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.