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Governmental Servers Wiped? Never!

Posted by timothy on from the but-this-is-in-australia dept.

Geoff writes with a story from Australia: "Eighteen AIX servers purchased from government via auction -- none of them had data removed from them. Ticket Vending and Validation source code, Payroll, Finance, Emails and Customer complaints. All there on every server; they were even nice enough to include some old backup tapes. At ~$14USD per server, it's amazing how cheap personal information has become."

5 of 284 comments (clear)

  1. 14 bucks? you got ripped :) by ashridah · · Score: 5, Interesting

    At ~$14USD per server, it's amazing how cheap personal information has become.
    $14 USD? You got ripped off.

    A few years back, some guy wearing a workmans uniform and holding a clipboard wandered into the (iirc) customs building here in Australia. Carted off one of the servers from a machine room, and no-one stopped them, or remembered what they looked like.
    Slashdot remembers :)

    Makes me proud to be an aussie sometimes :)

  2. Government by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Makes you wonder how many governmental organizations even know how important properly disposing of a computer can be.

    Or if the government really cares. Who's going to arrest them? There's no risk of punishment here.

  3. Re:Understandable . . . by acceber · · Score: 5, Interesting
    "Keep in mind that these servers came from the State Transit Authority of NSW, how is it possible and acceptable in this day of age that governmental servers be decommissioned and sold without wiping the contents of the drives?"

    The STA is responsible for the operations of the Sydney Buses network which I used to rely on for travel to & from school, work, and for social events -- until I got my car. It is the most unreliable system ever, on par with the NSW Cityrail system both which has been constantly riddled with problems. It's not surprising that a blunder such as this went by unnoticed.

    I would like to do my bit for the environment and use public transport as much as possible but I never get where I need to on time. I've been to Russia and even there, the buses and subway system are more reliable.

  4. Does he have a license to the source now? by mveloso · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Just wondering. He bought the computer and its contents from the government, so does he have rights to the source on the box?

  5. Reminds me of when I worked for US government... by Anti-Trend · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I used to work for city government here in SoCal, USA. In contrast to our Aussie friends, they were super paranoid about data leakage. When there was actually a situation where the red tape was momentarily pierced and we were authorized to give away outdated equipment to schools, they made us do a multiple-pass low-level format on each and every HDD that left the building. A royal pain-in-the-ass more than a security consideration -- none of those machines had anything which would be of much interest to anybody. If you ask me, the most damning piece of information one could gleam from those systems wasn't in the HDD at all. Rather, it's the glaring question of why there were gaming-class video and sound cards in all of the upper-management's old PCs, and nothing but cheap Trident cards in the CAD workstations of the time...

    -AT

    --
    Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.