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Man Finds Divorce Papers, Tax Docs On "New" Laptop
An anonymous reader writes "25-year-old Hidayat Sudirman found that his new laptop came loaded with more than just the usual software, it also contained 10GB of someone else's documents. From the article: "A buyer on the lookout for a new laptop got more than he bargained for at his local computer fair when the 'new' device came loaded with over 10GB of personal documents — including divorce papers and tax returns."
I probably wouldn't have noticed the documents, because the first thing I do with a new computer is make an image of it, toss the image into an archive bin, then whip out the DBAN or HDDErase media and zorch the drives.
This does three things -- ensures that any data previous to me is gone (because there are stories of even new devices having dubious content on them), checks to see if all sectors are readable/writable, and randomizes the data stored, so when I encrypt the drive using TrueCrypt or BitLocker, data that might have survived being written over will just be random numbers and useless for decryption attempts.
It is always a good habit to zero out media before using it, be it a USB flash drive, a MicroSD card, or a hard disk, just for the reasons above. It also is a good habit to do another thorough zeroing out before letting someone else have the media as well, for obvious reasons.