'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."

Comments

Re:Scandalous!

[zuzulo]

As a public service, links to three excellent, free, software based HDD wiping utilities. The first is even open source ...

Darik's Boot and Nuke
Active Kill Disk
PC Inspector

There should never be an excuse for selling or transfering ownership of a hard drive with pre-existing data when there are fast, free, and convienient utilities that can effectively remove all data without damaging HDD functionality. Physical destruction is of course, the most secure method of permanently wiping data, but for most folks good software based data destruction should be more than sufficient.

Obligatory disclaimer: I am in no way associated with any of the above products except as a satisfied user.

Re:A question of time

[swv3752]

So you are actually suggesting people open the hard drive and run a rare earth magnetic over the platters? Because anything short of an MRI is going to do jack squat to a modern hard drive. I have dropped a 1" cube nneodymiun magnet on a hard drive and it did nothing.

I have had friends try erasing hard drives with a bulk tape eraser. One failed to spin up. The other two would boot up fine and still had all thier data.