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'Destroyed' Hard Drive Found At Flea Market
Billosaur writes "From Yahoo News comes this tidbit about a couple who got a very shocking phone call. Henry and Roma Gerbus received a phone call from a man named Ed claiming he had purchased their old hard drive at a flea market. They had previously taken their computer to Best Buy to have the hard drive replaced and were told that the store would destroy it. Now it has turned up at a flea market, still containing their personal information, such as bank account numbers and Social Security numbers. The Gerbus' are a little perplexed and are very worried about identity theft."
Memo to store managers throughout the country: "Rotate a new batch of minimum-wage slaves into all positions, which demand technical skills and adherence to moral and ethical code, post haste!"
Gad! Whatever could motivate people who are compensated so well to scrap computers and sell parts at a flea market? I shall have to dwell further upon this great paradox this weekend at my summer cottage in the Hamptons.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What kind of person has his SSN in a hard drive?
Ninjas and pirates. How piquant.
Anyone that is taking a PC to Best Buy for a HDD replacement is probably sending money to Prince Abul Smith of Nigeria anyways.
Someone got serviced by the wrong Geek Squad guy
If the information on the hard drive was so sensitive, why didn't the couple destroy it themselves? Even if Best Buy did destroy it, an employee would have had access to it anyway before its destruction. That's a security risk either way.
Help kill corporate productivity!
If you want something wiped correctly, smash it yourself.
Even if Best Buy assured me they would destroy it, I would still grab a couple utilities to write nonsense bits onto the entire drive several times.
Of course, my biggest question is who is silly enough to throw out working storage space? My inner packrat insists that precious Gigabytes should coveted.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
Why do people try to do physical things to "destroy" magnetic media. You would think that Best Buy would have some software to erase the data (writing random 0/1's repeatedly). I suppose if they were replacing the hard drive Best Buy might have figured it wouldn't work, but at least they should have used a strong magnetic field.
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
Why would you pay a store to destroy something like a hard drive? Destroying it *yourself* is clearly way more fun.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
...do it yourself.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
"I'm not leaving myself open to identity theft," said Gerbus.
Quick! Close the barn door! The horse has bolted!
If the drive was being destroyed the store had no reason not to hand it over. He should have asked for it, or at the very least asked to be present at it's destruction.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Isn't it just great when your comppetition fucks themselves for you, saves so much on PR.
-Tim Louden
Is it Best Buys fault (yes of course, considering the outcome) but the user has to be to blame for not learning how to wipe everything off their drive before handing it over to the big machine to sort out as cheap as possible. Anyway, who doesn't keep everything nowadays. I got so many spare parts from all the computers I've had I should open up my own retail outlet.
My pleasure!!
...to get one of the several "cleaning" programs out there and run them? At the very least, I'd format the drive to deter casual inspection before just turning it over to some clerk at Best Buy. FWIW, I understand there's some platinum in drives, maybe $30 worth, perhaps your drive is worth more as scrap metal than as a drive, given the current commodity spike, but I'm not really sure. Once you've "cleaned" it, it might be interesting to take it to a recycler and see what you can get.
Magnetic media still can hold the ghost of bits held over a couple of overwrites- and that takes time.
Drilling a hole(s) in the media or slagging it takes less of it and is dead certain to fubar what was on it.
That's how the DoD and other serious government agency types declassify something computerized holding data that is classified Top Secret- you typically don't have time to erase it the right way when in a critical situation so you hit the drives with a thermite bomb, puncture it, etc.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Is there ANYTHING that Best Buy doesn't suck at?
Both companies are loaded with inepts. Now, it shows up that they are unscrupulus as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why would anyone trust Best Buy with their personal data?
This is not news. I'm surprised big box electronics stores aren't aggregating, sorting, and selling personal information from computers brought in for repairs or replacement. Would anyone hand over paper copies of their private legal and financial records to someone at a retail store? Why would they do the same thing in digital form?
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
I'd say they don't suck at attempting to sell extended warranties on everything.
"It's called: "Misplaced Trust in Corporate America""
How about the trust you place in me that the check I just wrote will not bounce? Society wouldn't work without trust. You can say it's "misplaced", but then were do you draw the line?
"The real translation behind the scenes is doubtless anything less than a fast call to the law firm Best Buy retains to see how much they could be sued for and another call to the PR department to get the above phrase looked up in the Table of Contents and issued to media outlets. Meanwhile in the board room the executives are probably all bent over, like a circular conga-line holding covers over the arses of those in front of them."
Most likely, but then the "cats out of the bag","the horse has left the barn". What should have been done wasn't. Now weither that was due to corporate neglect, or employee neglect isn't known.
No. No there is not. I've had to do their tech support. I swear some of those idiots at the tech-bench are so useless, I'm amazed they don't virus-infect every computer they work on.
Oh wait... they HAVE done that multiple times. At multiple stores.
But no... they're all idiots there.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
Word of advice to anyone who doesn't do hardware themselves:
If your HDD craters and the system doesn't recognize it as a boot disk and you can't reinstall your OS on the drive, take a magnet to it before you EVER hand it over to anyone/throw it away. If it has even a shred of personal information (which today, they all do) you need to give it a ride on the magical magnet train. It takes literally two seconds. There's nothing wrong with a little healthy paranoia.
And here's another piece of advice: Find someone you know who's good with hardware. If you have hardware acting funny or generally dying on you, talk to them FIRST. Tell them you'll owe them a favor, offer to buy them a rack of beers, whatever the hell you have to do to keep it out of some commerical enterprise. This is what friends are for. If you don't have a friend who has this kind of knowledge... You must be Amish. To which I say, wtf are you doing with a computer anyway.
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Why do people (apparently) keep storing their social security numbers and bank account numbers in unencoded text files on their computers? Apparently it's the only thing people EVER store on their hard drives, judging from stories like these!
I guess I better get started because right now I don't think my bank account number is on my computer anywhere....
isn't so much with the people who unwittingly failed to be uber-1337 and erase and zero-fill and nonsense-fill their hard drive. They are non-technical people, its wrong to expect them to be able to predict this sort of occurence because they arent as paranoid (mostly because they dont know what could happen).
So yeah, they dont know what they are doing. But the situation still shouldnt have occurred because frankly, best buy should do better than that. And if its not the companies failing but instead an individual, then they should know better than that. I know its fairly proselytizing to say that out of the three entities involved, two are wrong and one is right, but look at the relationship.
The people going to the store are paying for a service, they obviously cant or dont want to perform the task themselves, therefore they pay. In return the company has a responsiblity(?) or at least a vested interest in providing them with the service they have come for. Which in this case should have included (at the very least) some sort of fill.
The other possiblity of course is that someone dumpster dived the drive out of best-buy's trash. In which case, its still Best Buy's fault for not clearing the drive.
Can't we all just get along
Are we all that lulled into a sense of security from the GS's white shirts and sometimes skinny black ties?
C'mon!
I imagine the folks in the story are a lot like my relatives- not quite luddites, but know enough to know they don't know everything.
Listen, I can change my own oil--- but I know that if I need a new catalytic something-or-other, I want the old part back (or at least to see my old part) from the mechanic... Isn't that just a common practice when we go to garages to have our heaps fixed? Or am I the only one still doin' that??? Same thing should go for these folks---
Frankly, while I agree it shouldn't happen, people need to be a little more aware and safeguard themselves to at least SOME degree of common sense. Putting the blame solely on the evil corporation that doesn't pay it's teen techs nearly enough isn't gonna work. That's like saying playing Quake will make you a serial killer or that McDonald's makes you fat.
Sorry- just don't buy into it.
It's a good wake-up call I guess to wise-up.
My I say the guy that bought the drive at the flea market, he is a decent bloke/guy/fella. He had a look at what was on the drive he bought, and then he felt it pertinent to alert the original owners to their vulnerability and not just screw them with identity theft.
looks like the guys from best buy need to go to the same training school that amir massoud tofangsazan is off to...
It was on the Minneapolis news that Best Buy installed someone's hard drive in a different customer's computer a couple month ago.
I'd say they don't suck at sucking.
My Dic...
Oh wait right, Lisa works there.
Who in their right mind would buy a used hard drive at a flea market?
Footix - President, Society For Putting Things On Top Of Other Things
Here's the problem: A low paid employee, rather than drill holes in a drive, took it home and sold it off at a flea market. It's a small object of possibly (depending upon contents) very great value.
Where are the controls to prevent such action taking place? Consider the bank teller -- not likely a very highly paid employee, yet thousands of dollars in coin and currency pass through their hands every day. Banks have worked out procedures to ensure their employees remain honest, whether balancing their drawers, surveillance cameras, or limiting how much they may hold in at their station at any given time (i.e. if Bill Gates walks in with a suitcase full of money, the teller must turn the large deposit over to a bank officer.)
Clearly as things of great risk assume different (smaller) dimensions people in charge have not adapted their procedures. This is a failure of Best Buy at the corporate level, not just some store. They need these items to be handled with full accountability.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
DBAN, Darik's Boot And Nuke. Glancing over the list it has all eh same features of the "pro" one and doesn't cost a dime. Is even OSS, if that kind of thing makes a difference to you.
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
is how pompous everyone here sounds! People, this is Ma and Pa Kettle going to FREAKING BEST BUY for computer help! They are not 733t and have no idea what cleaning apps do... give it a rest. Realize that in most cases this is what people do.
I send back, on average, one drive every few months under warranty. Most times the drives have failed so I can't even low-level format it. I've always wondered what happens to these drives. Are they destroyed? Re-used? As drives get bigger and more and more files are placed on them, it's not surprising that people may *think* the drives are clean when they are not. And I know it's easy to blame the folks for letting the drive out of their possession, but think about it: they were told it was to be destroyed; people put files on their drives (that's what they're for); if the store offered to "dispose" of their old PC (many places do this), there's a reasonable expectation (especially if they're told) that their data would be destroyed, if not the hardware.
Three cheers for Corporate America!
You know, people complain about this being a litigious society, but really, the reason is because law enforcement is doing NOTHING to pursue clear violations like this, which are happening more and more often.
If companies didn't lie through their teeth, and do absolutely immoral activities like this one, we wouldn't NEED "tort reform"* in the first place.
* Note: "tort reform" is the political code-word for eliminating your right to your day in court, even when companies have, in fact, broken the law. See: "Death Tax"
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Apparently, they don't suck at sucking.
Or if you want to look at it this way...
They suck at being exceptional... They are exceptional at being sucky.
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
Tagged: ShouldHaveSoldItOnEbay (Camelcaps for readability)
As a former BestBuy/GeekSquad employee I can tell you that the company procedure was: 1.) Drill holes in hard drive. 2.) Send Computer to Best Buy Service Center to be discarded. When a customer would bring a computer in to be recycled I would open the cover with them standing there. I'd remove the hard drive and take a drill and put multiple 1/4 inch holes through the hard drive. I'd have the customer watch me do this and drill until they were happy. After that I would put the hard drive back into the computer and send it to a service center. 90% of your GeekSquad/BestBuy Employees have no idea what they are doing. They are also only getting paid $10 / hr. Don't expect much. There are one or two in each store that generally know more then you'd expect. But they are also only getting paid $10 / hr. If you want great service, It helps to have boobs. I'm not joking.
I do not think this is the couple's fault at all. Best Buy supposedly was serviced to erase/destroy the hard drive. In a perfect world, people would take care of destroying their own data. Apparently, in this case, the couple seemingly didn't know how, so they hired Best Buy to take care of this - which is (usually) the next most responsible choice.
Sombody went dumpster diving.
Hard drives? I've found whole systems sitting on the curb as "garbage". I've taken them home to see what (if anything) still works that might be salvaged. Half the time the system boots fine once the clock/CMOS battery is replaced. Usually they contain mundane junk on the hard drive, but a few times there has been personal stuff on there. If it looks important (documents and other stuff created by the owner), I try to contact the owner and give it back to them. If not, I don't bother.
The weird thing is, probably 9/10 of the salvaged machines contain nothing but games, P2P software, and downloaded media. Well, that and boatloads of spyware/adware. Few people ever create anything of their own with these machines. They are used as expensive game/media consoles. I start to understand why there is such a strong desire by some companies to come up with the ideal "game/media centre". If done right, it would satisfy most of the home market.
Who says software should be used to wipe a disk out. There's more appropriate hardware to do a more than adequate job. I can't be the only redneck geek out there.
Just take it apart and smash the platters.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Do they sell vacuums?
write them all you want randomly, your data will still exist, even as a shadow on a burned chunk of mylar. All you need is a power cable and a power supply. Possibly the quickest way to protect your data when you toss the drive is with some assorted flavor drill bits on the end of that DeWalt using a slice of Finlandia as a template.
While Best Buy is still in the wrong, I think someone did some dumpster diving.
that is why people pay to have work done. The poeple didnot know how to do that, and relied on a cmopany to be true to there word. The company committed fraud.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
With an IBM glass platered HD, you can open it up, and smash the platters quite easilly.. or if there aluminum like most, they can make a nice set of coasters... or if your paranoid, just bend it over on itself, and put it in the bin.
:)
Mine makes a rather fancy shaving mirror
Might be worth it. Seriously.
Well, as a retail place, I have no complaints with them. It's as good a place as any to pick up software (Well, entertainment, anyway. Most work software I have can be trased through a few copys back to sourceforge or a GNU ftp mirror). Just, never go to them for support. Ever. EVEREVEREVER. EVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVER!
(Heh, after typeing this I noticed my image word for this post is "overkill")
Listen dipshit. Take a hard drive apart and you will find two very strong actuator magnets riding about one centimeter from the spinning platters and your recommending some magical magnet rub on the external case? Beyond being a complete moron who doesn't know its dick from a donut, you've never tried your method nor even had a hard drive apart yet are on Slashdot exclaiming your technical genius. Your a joke.
Try a vigorous application of a 36 ounce ball peen to the circuit board side and make sure you punch the motor a couple times too. Done.
Your probably "Geek Squad" yourself. Certainly sound like it.
Dipshit.
The story doesn't add up and whoever wrote it may have get the Best Buy legal department back at him/her.
If this couple is so technologically-challenged, that means they "assume" they needed a new HD either because the one they had was full or defective (later not lickely since it worked afterwards) so they brought the PC to Best Buy altogether.
The issue here is that Best Buy one way or another, defaulted to replacing the drive, which sound very unlikely since many have a lot of their own information there and not that easy will allow its destruction.
If this happened as reported, then Best Buy is not liable for just not destroying the drive, but for deceiving their customers by not offering alternatives as returning the drive to the owner or putting it as a slave, and if they did, then the couple is totally responsible for their mistake.
Woman finds human finger in a Wendy burger!!! Man bites dog!!!
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The general-public don't *care*. They *delete* a file and think its gone. There's no point explaining that it's only the FAT entries that have gone and their data is still there - they *don't care*. To them it's - gone.
... ... how computers work - my point is - peolpe will believe what they want - "the file *has* been deleted".
Off-topic - I had an arguement once with a friend of a friend after I'd said you could copy a computer file umpteen million times and you'd still get exactly the same file as the original - they argued that it would decay with each copy and obviously had no comprehension of
I think it's high time manufacturers made hard drives as easy to insert and remove as a Nintendo cartridge. There's really no reason for them to be designed so that the average user can't swap it out himself, or remove it before selling the computer or taking it in for repair.
No, but there is that sound of rushing wind when they open their mouths.
I have nothing to say.
That's kind of mean. Why would you want to do that to a perfectly nice set of BOOBS?
destroying harddrives? that's awesome!
Solution seems simple enough...request to get the old hard drive back along with the computer. Therefore you know where it is so it doesn't pop up later in the wrong hands. Because it's a hard drive, exceptions should be made with replacement. At my work, if we need a computer part replaced by Dell, we normally have to send the defective part back. HOWEVER, if that part is a hard drive, all we need to do is email a form back to them and we can keep the hard drive to be destroyed by us.
What's the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback?
Good question. I would like to know too. I guess people could encrypt their datas before their HDDs even have problems.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I've never sold off or threw out or RMAed any of my hard drives. I give them a few good software whipes and use as paperweights or get an external case and there's another backup drive.
HDDs are around 50 cents or less per GB. Except those people who do their hardware shopping at BestBuy and arn't reading this.
If you really have to get it replaced look for someone who will let you keep the platters and just send back some of it. If they exist, have to keep the "refurbished" industry in business.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
someone has stolen my identity!
that said.. who am i?!
(boy I hate improper terminology used to describe fraud by impersonation)
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
THE JERK SQUAD STRIKES AGAIN.
"They said rest assured. They drill holes in it so it's useless," said Gerbus.
Whats so hard about doing that himself?
see, this is why I never sell my hard drives. what's the point? I might get, what, a $20 bill for one? Nah, no thanks, me, I just take a sledge hammer to 'em when I'm through with 'em. And then, after sledge hammering 'em, I burn 'em...
The story posted is incorrect, the actual situation was a customer's computer that was sent to a service center from best buy, and the service center used a hard drive from another computer(junked out as being not fixable) placed into another computer. This is the story I've heard through the grapevine of being pretty trusted.
-GeekSquad didn't do this.
John Walsh once found me while looking for some other kid. He was not amused.
damn the geek squad for not caring so much as to not at least wiping the hard drive before they parted/canibalized the parts. do those managers even seem to watch or care? well...now i work in a corporate enviornment...so yea lol. if we have a dead or whatever hard drive we don't want/cant use...we give it away :)
"In the kingdom where everything dies, the sky is mortal."
An unscrupulous 18 year old, or thereabouts, who was trusted by a 30-something manager stole something of value, and lied about it. End of story. Saying Best Buy is responsible here is like holding Linus responsible for monetary loss that happened because someone with legitimate access to root decided he would start embezzling.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
After you've wiped a computer with DBAN, take out the disk and snap it in half. The next time you need to DBAN something, just download a new copy. No matter WHAT you write on it, someone will put it in a computer just to see what it does. Either that, or lock it up as tight as you would a loaded firearm.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Always use raid x0 or 0x for important info
probably 80% of /. users have boobs, and we _still_ get lousy service!
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If I have a disk with a bad bearing or head crash, I have to send the drive back intact to claim my warranty and so I'm trusting my data to someone else. At work thats a violation of our security policy so we don't ever send disks back unless we are very sure what data was on it which effectively means drives that died within a few hours of being installed in a machine.
What needs to happen is the S.M.A.R.T. software on the drive needs to be a bit smarter and allow the diagnostics tools to coordinate with the manufacturers web site so that the company is sure the disk is in fact defective and they know the cause. If they determine that they don't want the disk back anyway, then let the consumer dispose of it. If they can repair the disk, then its most likely not an internal problem so if its repairable, the data should still be on it when it gets back.
You've got a moral (and in some jurisdictions, a legal) obligation to get in touch with the original owner. The drive might have been stolen. If after purchasing property you have reason to suspect that it is owned by someone who didn't sell it to you, you not performing due diligence will get you into a bit of hot water (ask your favorite pawn shop, although they're specially regulated to avoid this). The data might already have been compromised. For example, someone could have read it (or copied the entire thing) and then sold the original to make an extra $20 on top of what selling their credit card number and whatnot will get them online (not much). Altering the owners that their data may have been compromised allows them to take steps to avoid nasty losses. We once had a situation at my place of employment where we ended up with a 100 page legal document with (at a glance) a heck of a lot of "this is private" come in on our "incoming orders" fax line. I immediately alerted my manager, shredded pages 2 - 100, and got the task of calling the sender and telling him what happened. I got the phone slammed on me twice because he thought it was a sales call (I was speaking from the mandatory script: "This is Patio11 calling on behalf of X Corporation and..."). Third time I got his attention by "We are not the law office of Duey, Cheatum, and Howe but we somehow got a copy of your _______ filing. This is Patio11 calling on behalf of X Corporation. We have destroyed the fax and suggest that you check the number you are sending it to very carefully." I didn't even get an apology for it. Ahh well, the joys of telephone customer service.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I don't know what's worse: a.) you can buy someone's hard drive from the flea market with all their personal information or b.) you can buy someone's leather belt with their name stamped on it and claim it as your own, even if your name isn't Jim Bob
Why chuck a pair of perfectly good refrigerator magnets? I ALWAYS open dead hard drives and extract the super-strong magnets before disposing of the rest. Typically, a new calendar will be held to the fridge without a hint of slippage by just one of these. Put the other one on any metal surface near where you keep your beer cold, to hold a spare opener. The disk platters are nice and bronzy; very pretty hanging from the Xmas tree among the lights.
I repeat this process 35 times to ensure Guttman level erasure.
This space available.
OK, I know it's playoff time, but no more layups. Of course not. The AC units blow.
"Clearly as things of great risk assume different (smaller) dimensions people in charge have not adapted their procedures. This is a failure of Best Buy at the corporate level, not just some store. They need these items to be handled with full accountability."
So in other words you want the life of workers to get even harder. I don't see a problem with it, but then I don't get on slashdot and bitch about "the man is getting me down".
How did this thing end up at a flea market? I can think of a few scenarios where the BBY employee was unscrupulously selling broken or even working equipment at a flea market, but I kind-of doubt that. Not saying it's impossible just like to present a more likely scenario.
This is the fast-food of computer repair so the guy probably took out the old drive which reported several bad sectors in scandisk, dropped it in the trash and forgot about it. Later that day/week a bum that regularly dives their dumpster for crap to sell at a flea market did his normal job. Some dude out for the cheapest possible hard drive buys it then looks to see what is on it, because he's a perv and expects amature porn. Then because he rode the short bus he calls the previous owner to admit guilt.
Why is this hapless joe who accidentally mounted a hard drive then scoured it's contents closely enough to find social security numbers and the like guilty? It's like walking down a street and seeing a house with a door open. You can see the open door, and anything plainly visible from the street because of the open door. The second you walk through that door, you have trespassed.
But forget that amature porn collector.
Best Buy could solve all of this by issuing a 2lb hammer to all employees. It would help morale by providing an outlet for the rage incited by the latest management-speak directive from coorporate or the GM.
how could they know to pull and destroy the drive themselves? if they were taking the machine to a Best Buy to get a new HDD, they probably are not comfortable opening the machine themselves.... and maybe did not know how to transfer all their data over. i do feel bad for them. especially considering the employee assured them the store had a drive destruction procedure. i guess some employee was making some easy cash with the old parts.
my parents learned the same lesson when they traded in a car and were told the dealership had a shredder they fed the old license plates into. about 6 months later my dad was getting parking tickets on his plate for the wrong car in a part of the city he did not go to. even though they had signed and notarized papers, it was a nightmare to straighten out.
No matter WHAT you write on it, someone will put it in a computer just to see what it does.
So WHAT?
Several years ago, the small company worked for used a local mom & pop outfit to buy & repair the office computers. This particular shop made a point of offering "great deals" on refurbished and used equipment. Of course we bought only the best, all-new PCs from them...
Well, one cow-orker's HDD failed, and the aforementioned computer shop swapped it out for a new one. A little while later, we got a new employee in and ordered a new PC for him. When the "new" PC's C: drive was examined, it turned out to still have the first cow-orker's data on it!
I don't know which was worse, the fact that sensitive company data had been potentially exposed, or the fact that they sold us a used, known-bad hard drive as new?!
Use the only language that corporations understand: sue them, and sue them big. Then and only then will the "Our company values and places the utmost importance on maintaining the privacy of our customers. We will fully investigate these allegations." hypocresy they gave those poor customers will take any real significance. It is unfortunate, but in the good old US it is true.
...to use one of these ?
I actually used to work for the geeksquad and there was a lot of problems there, so I will list them. 1. Employees took parts from computers we threw out home, including hard drives, and the managers really didn't care. 2. Employees copied customers files from their computers onto the store computers (aka, found porn on the customers computers, often of customers or of the people they knew and kept it). 3. Employees often didn't fix problems completely because they thought it was too much work. 4. And to top it off, I often found managers browsing through the files that the employees kept and thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
It's never to late to start the day over...
My old HDs always end up at the shooting range for target practice. There is nothing quite like the feeling of filling an old 2 gig seagate full of lead ;) Very satisfying!
;)
I've got a couple on my desk at work with holes strait through. No one will EVER recover my data - or rifle through my stuff
Actually, yes they do. Dysons, at least. Now whether Dysons are any good at sucking in the first place...
All comments are properties and trademarks of the voices in my head. Not like I'm gonna claim them.
WITH FIRE!!!
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
There's a few comments about "Why not erase the drive yourself before you hand it in?" My thought is this - it is likely (although not specified in TFA) that they wanted the contents of the drive moved to the new one.
If they are keeping the same PC, but have a new drive in it, and the old drive is still funcitonal (and can be A) sold on the open market, and B) works enough to recover data), it is likely what they wanted was a larger or faster drive, and it is also likely they didn't want to reinstall all the software themselves (or else they would have done it themselves to begin with - the software can be more tedious than the physical install).
So you don't erase it before you hand it in, because you still need the contents. AFTER the data has been moved to the new drive, and you get the PC back, sure... but who is likely to hook up an old HD and test it for data wipe when you're asking someone else to swap it out in the first place?
The NSA, AT&T, and mob bosses aren't above the laws of physics (just those of man). If they wanted info *that* badly, they'd put a hood on you and wire your genitals to a battery.
Better living through obfuscation. Project White Noise
There's nothing in the article to confirm whether the poor, ignorant consumers actually gave the drive to tech support for disposal, or just talked with a floor clerk and dropped it in the recycling bin. In either case, bad Best Buy. But bad consumer if they just dropped it in a recycling bin.
We are the 198 proof..
The guy who bought the hard drive had the right idea. I'd rather go to a flea market then Best Buy too! And for Christ's sake, never believe what a tech or a customer service rep tells you about your security. Rather typical of a Best Buy customer to hand over a hard drive like this full of personal information.
across the front of the table.
20 bucks say the flea market booth was run by a Best Buy employee to supplement his meager pay using "discards" he had acquired from the store.
We are the 198 proof..
Not just in the computer side of the house, they are a serious rip off company. That's why I call them "Worst Bye".
Heh, when I worked there they supposedly were supposed to drill holes in the hard drive/platters. Perhaps that's changed now...
I'll buy their hard drive and wipe it -- just have to reload Windows XP on it... ;-) That should overwrite most of the space right from the start!
--- Just another Code-Monkey
Don't forget to wipe your butt and wash your hands after using the facilities.
We are the 198 proof..
thier hands har har
This illustrates the need to keep replaced parts, even if they are considered "dead."
Mistake #1: They asked to have a perfectly good hard drive destroyed rather than keep it as a backup unit.
Mistake #2: They trusted a disinterested third party to destroy a perfectly good hard drive containing all sorts of information.
Mistake #3 (maybe): They didn't wipe the drive clean themselves before having it replaced. This may not really be a mistake, if part of the new drive installation was copying the data from the old drive to the new drive, so we'll give them the benefit of the doubt here.
Moral of the story: keep the old drives, whether they work or not, and if it needs to be destroyed, do it yourself.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I used to build some reasonably big servers. Of course, some of these would be used for what would be considered sensitive information. Hard drives that had crashed were tested by our service dept., then by me, then returned to the manufacturer (occasionally overseas). Fucks me what they did with them. I always assumed they re-used good controller boards or just the ICs, but really any lowly paid technician could be stealing information.
When I worked for a hospital I had access to hundreds of machines and servers with sensitive information. There were old hard drives lying around our lab and that came in daily to be destroyed. This was taken pretty seriously, but again, lots of people had access to these drives.
There is sensitive information lying on hard drives What this whole story comes down to, is that some kid was told to 'destroy' a drive and it ended up in his backpack.
It's scary to think of what is floating around out there, given the high number of laptop/etc thefts occuring recently. Every piece of sensitive information on my machines (tax/finances/etc), in case of theft, is encrypted with blowfish. Have a look at bcrypt .
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. -- Albert Einstein
I picked up a computer from the side of the road once. Got it home and opened it to discover the inside totally smashed! RAM sockets beaten down with a hammer and screwdriver! Processor socket totally ripped off! PCI slots busted! I think you know what's coming- yup, the hard drive was totally untouched. I hooked it up, copied the data off it to a DVD and mailed it to the guy with a letter about how to actually destroy the data on a machine. I also chided him, if the machine still worked before his "ministrations" there are many uses for old hardware (that I certainly don't need to tell you guys about).
:-)
Moral: if are a n00b and you think you're destroying your machine, you aren't. Get someone who knows what they're doing!
Some great porn on that machine too....
Ah, good times, good times....
GOOD!
If I write "Do not use or Boot from this disk" on it, well, they have earned their sufferring.
Same as if I writed "Secret : Don't use" on a floppy filled with match-heads and nail-varnish (also fun, though slightly more complex to do right).
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Drilling holes is a lot quicker. And less likely to get shards of hard drive platter all over the room.
Can't spell worth a damn, but still smarter than the average slashdotter.
...for a good skeet tosser and a 12 guage shotgun. It is exceedingly difficult to get data off a drive that has been hit with buckshot at reasonably close range. Just make sure its not Dick Cheny doing the shotgun work.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
That check you wrote is verified by one of maybe four possible companies before it gets put into the cash drawer. There is no trust, you tool.
And before you start prattling off about retailers trusting the check verification companies, there are clauses in the contract that make the verifying company responsible for fraudulent (and in some cases even NSF) checks as long as the retailer followed the appropriate procedure to validate the check (such as getting a DL# or DOB, etc).
One more time: There is no trust. Trust is the basis of the honor system, which is the easiest system to exploit. Welcome to the 21st century. Enjoy your stay.
Same as with copyrights.
/. would've figured this out by now!
Theft |= fraud.
No one's ID has been stolen. However the potential for it to be used frauduantly has been increased.
Let's not call it ID theft when it is really ID fraud!
GEESH! You think
Libertas in infinitum
1. Make Linux floppy / LiveCD
2. Boot and/or open terminal.
3. [sudo] dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
4. Done.
they should have just logged the drive. and by logged, i mean smashed with a large log. it's fun, and you won't have to worry about somebody recovering anything from it...
now is the winter of our discotheque
Their floors are really shiny.
Until you get to the carpet. Then, not so shiny.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Personally I prefer a Hilti .22 cartidge powered Nail Gun...
That sounds like a pretty wimpy way to dispatch an old hard drive.
A 12 gauge shotgun with slug cartridges would be much more satisfying.
The Gerbus' are a little perplexed and are very worried about identity theft.
They're probably the only drive replacement customer who *shouldn't* be worried -- they found their drive, after all!
I just love this ad that came up when viewing these posts. from thinkgeek: Magnoids, curiously strong magnets.
heh, just how strong? enough to wipe an HDD at ten paces?
Actually that's not how it works in most stores. In fact there are very few stores that actually have good check verifications systems. The best ones are usually at large chain grocery stores. Tons of department stores and small shops have their own verfication systems that only check against a database for their own stores. I held two retail jobs in college and both of them were for large corporations. One had a check verification system that only checked against previous requests at the same location, and the other one didn't even have that much. You simply had to have a manager sign off on it and it was accepted. We had a hand written list of people that we wouldn't accept checks from. Remember both of these stores are a part of large corporations with easily recognizable names, and hundreds of stores nationwide.
Time makes more converts than reason
I am cleaning out my office at home. I used DBAN - Dan's boot and nuke for drives which worked. It has a variety of options including DOD multiple pass overwrites. For the drives that did not work enough for DBAN to function, I dis-assembled the drives, removed the platters and use a bulk tape eraser. In addition, the platters are never going back into a drive. If someone wants to use an atomic force microscope on my groovy new hard drive platter clocks, I suppose they may get some data off. I think the ROI is pretty small for an identity thief however, and the NSA already knows all my secrets.
Zoot
enough is too much
I avidly dumpster-dive CompUSA for their discarded (or slightly damaged) computer parts; I just bring some tools into the dumpster and strip them right there (what a wasteful lot we Americans are). I'm not out to retrieve personal information though; my goal is to Frankenstein together free computers for my community. One of my most common finds is working (but ancient) hard drives, as the only way they seem to "destroy" the computers is by taking a hammer to the case and moniter. Of course the first thing I do is format these drives, but they are commonly filled with junk. I've never found a BestBuy that didn't use a trash compactor, so I doubt that this drive was dug out of the garbage. Still, kind of disturbing how easy it would be to get some personal information if you really wanted to.
puhlease! thous dost protest too much.
just tell your former (current?) employer to get ready to pay the piper - corporate responsibility and all...
how many times has this happened where the original owner wasn't contacted?
no, this isn't enough to pierce the corporate veil... but it darn well should pierce thir corporate bank account!
This happens all the time. I belong to several local freecycle (freecycle.org) groups, and people routinely offer old PCs. I've accepted a couple myself (which I refurbish and then freecycle again), and in both instances I found personal information remaining on them, even though the former owners were giving them to a complete stranger.
In the first instance, I sent them a followup reply advising them to wipe the drives of any future systems they might decide to freecycle; rather than express relief and thank me for the information, they spitefully ignored me as if I were some wacko out to con them.
Secondly, we need everyone to memorise the following procedure. Works for any HDD that can be got to spin up and doesn't need any extra software.
- Save much {innocuous} crap on the hard drive till it's full and won't fit anymore. Ripping CDs as
.wav files, or scanning images as .bmps, is good for this. You want there to be no free space at all on the drive. - Delete the stuff you don't want found. Now the only place there is any room to save anything is where the stuff you just deleted used to have been.
- Save more crap on the hard drive till it's full again. Now you have definitely overwritten the stuff you deleted before.
- Delete all the crap you saved.
Easy; and leaves the drive in reusable condition, even with your operating system still in place.You could use DBAN but don't bother with more than two overwrite passes; even the second might be overkill. Throughout the last fifty years, there have been many computer storage technologies based on magnetism. Not a single one of those has taken advantage of remanence phenomena to increase storage density. About the nearest thing I've seen was a "trick record" switch on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which cut off the power supply to the erase head {remember energised-field erase heads?} allowing you to create a sort of primitive overdubbing effect; if the first recording was cranked up till the bright green bands met and tried to cross over, you might hear a faint ghost of it under the second. Of course, an analogue tape recorder is working in linear mode, where saturation is undesirable. As opposed to a digital device, which drives everything hard into saturation by deliberate design.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
What's all this talk about using magnets to destroy HDDs. Just open up the casing and take an angle-grinder to the platters, for crying out loud. Then discard the remnants in different waste bins in different locations. Problem solved.
Are those idiots that dumb they dont realise the computer can use two hard drives?
Surely just using it as a second HD would have been better.
Never trust brand name top stores for desktops, but only for laptops.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
It is a deliberate action of stupidity to ask someone else to keep your (digital) identity safe when you can (and should) do it!
Are those guys really understanding their mistake? I guess no.
I understand that copying the data between the old and the new disk can be not trivial, so you ask the shop to do it. But please, ask your HD back or ask to have it still in the box as a second drive.
Apart of using one of those software tools called "safe eraser", there is a number of good technicques to make your old HD unreadable:
1. Hammer a nail or two straight into the HD unit.
2. Hammer the unit itself.
3. Send a 220VAC (or 100VAC where available) to the power socked of the HD.
4. Dissect the HD, and brush the disks with a small magnet.
5. Unleash your chainsaw.
All of these techniques need no more than 15 minutes. And you can use more than one of them.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What is wrong with you people! This is the sign of the end times! Destroyed hard drives rising from the dead and dissapearing from their final resting place to come up and show people their secrets elsewhere! He has been resurrected! Jesus is coming back in digital form! There was a typo in the Bible..it really said "The GEEK shall inheret the earth!"
I really am bored today.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Sure a few 1/4" holes will make it difficult to spin up the drive in the normal manner. But it doesn't do a thing to the data on other parts of the platters. Your SSN or "home videos" might be fully recoverable. You'd need to use specially programmed spindle motors and be creative with the voice coil controls to miss the holes, but you could probably recover most of the data.
Even if you have a working drive and overwrite the data with random patterns, it's still possible, with specially tweaked read heads, to recover older bits off the platters.
If you want to be sure, disassemble the drive and sand the oxide off the platters. Then scatter the oxide widely.
If the couple knew before-hand that BB was going to replace the drive, they should've removed it from the system first.
If they didn't know until after dropping it off, they should've demanded the drive back.
Now, there's no guarantee that they would've received their old drive. What's to stop a BB cronie from simply handing them another drive they'd drilled as proof? It's not like they'd be able to take it home and verify it was theirs, unless they were smart enough to write down the serial #.
Even then, BB could simply claim it was drilled and disposed of.
At least the guy who purchased it was honest enough to call them and inform them of BB's fuck-up.
Let's hope that if their credit reports end up getting screwed, they sue BB. They could possibly go after the guy who returned the drive to them, providing they can prove he was the one who did it.
I'm damned glad I've always built my own PCs and destroyed my bad drives before disposing of them.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
I've found scissors to be pretty fast and effective for CDs and DVDs (at least against the average trash scavenger) but what are the best options?
Google dban:
If you can burn a CD and your computer can boot from CDs, you can nuke your own computer. Everyone should know about this.
I once saw a news story on this topic. That Iranian students were painstakingly reassembling the shredded documents from the occupied US embassy. Looking for evidence against the 'Great Satan' and proof of US control of the Shah's government, and so on.
Then I realized that at the time, Iran was in the mist of a totally insane and extremely bloody war. This shredded paper reconstruction, I realized, was a ploy of the well-connected Iranians to keep their children out of the military at a time when all young men were being indiscriminately slaughtered for a dubious cause. Who cared what results they got? As long as when the war was over their children were alive and well, and could prove that they did important service for the cause that necessiated them being away from the front lines.
Every country does this in every war. The poor bleed, the well-connected read. More power to them.
So, if you are making minimum wage, you are not expected to have ethics?
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
"Hard Drive Found At Flea Market "
What are a bunch of fleas going to do with an old hard drive?
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
My favorite HDD wiping utility is to install WindowsXP service pack 2 on the drive!
I expect someone to drill holes in the damn hard drive.
Idiot.
I'd have to say that Circuit City takes the prize for that one. Guy in front of me the other day was buying two music CDs. Cashier asked him if he wanted a service plan FOR HIS CDS!!! $0.99 for one of them, $1.99 for the other (must have been a new release). The moron said yes. I'm not into stereotyping, but the guy didn't strike me as someone with a lot of disposable (literally!) incoming either.
Unbelievable.
Breach of contract.......
I see quite a few comments suggesting that an employee took the drive home and later sold it. I suggest something less nefarious: Dumpster Divers. Most certainly many slashdotters have engaged in such activities and it should be surprise to none that Best Buy would have goodies ready for the pillage. /me glances at his pc-turned-firewall and thinks, "good find"
the problem is with warranty drives. i cannot return them the drive that has been squished or made into small pieces. i don't have a very very strong magnet sitting around the house so that is no go.
anyway, i just had to replace my laptop drive this monday by ibm. i have the set security on (finger print, passphrase, harddrive passwords, windows passwords.) my question right now is if they will be able to access the drive even though i tried to secure it. confidential files in windows have been encrypted but regular docs are not encrpted though. i have activated fingerprint, etc. am i relying too much on the security features?
the technical support person told me that they will be destroying the drive after receiving it. i'm not sure now if they will reuse the drive. hmmm....
note, their support was surprisingly fast (they delivered the replacement drive to my doorstep less than 3 hours) for me to be able to totally delete the drive (i was backing up the files.) i had to return the defective drive back to the delivery guy. i didn't pay for any extended or priority warranty service.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Alternative two words: "blast furnace".
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Since you are going to need a complemetry source of income, you can only be expected to have minimum ethics.
FRA: STFU GTFO