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Study Finds 1 in 10 Used Hard Drives Contains Old Personal Data
Lucas123 writes "A newly published study by Britain's data protection regulatory agency found that more than one in 10 second-hand hard drives being sold online contain recoverable personal information from the original owner. "Many people will presume that pressing the delete button on a computer file means that it is gone forever. However this information can easily be recovered," Britain's Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, said in a statement. In all, the research found 34,000 files containing personal or corporate information were recovered from the devices. Along with the study, a survey revealed that 65% of people hand down their old PC, laptop and cell phones to others. One in ten of those people who disposed of their old devices, left all their data on them. The British government also offered new guidelines for ensuring devices are properly wiped of data."
Who is going to bother with a time-consuming forensic-analysis style attack with a 10% chance of success when you can break into some company and get thousands of credit card numbers and/or SSNs? Sheesh, if you want credit card numbers, just get a job at any restaurant as a waiter.
Take them out, smash it with a sledgehammer and toss the scraps.
Require vendors to accept HDDs back for wiping, the same way they are required to accept batteries back for recycling. When you are done with your PC you can take it back to where you bought it for secure erasure, or optionally they could just send you a CD (or why not just include it in the box) that wipes the HDD and maybe puts it back to factory settings.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And won't until this worrying trend of not including magnets in hard drives catches up to me.
A few years back, I happened to visit my dentist's office just after he had all of his workstations upgraded. By the medical/dental s/w maintenance vendor's technician. While the tech was standing there, I asked my dentist what he was going to do with all his old PC's. Donate them to a local school, he said. I asked if there was any patient data on them. He told me that the vendor's tech had reformatted the hard drives, so that wouldn't be a problem. I asked him (within earshot of that tech) if he had ever heard of the 'unformat' command. I then suggested that he have the vendor investigate DBAN before letting these machines off the property.
I don't know who is responsible for the loss of patent data under HIPAA regulations. But I'd hope that vendors specializing in medical IT support would.
Have gnu, will travel.
I would venture to guess that most people don't realize that deleting a file doesn't completely wipe it. The bigger question is, how many people who buy or receive those second hand-drives are looking to recover the data, and what % of them would do something with it that would NOT be okay with the original owner. I'd like to think not that many. But then again, I wouldn't be surprised if there were scammers who look to buy cheap used drives to see if they can dig up some useful info on it. Seems to me that would be higher yield than trying to phish for it with spam, and easier than trying hack websites.
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
I don't go over handwritten documents with a fucking eraser to re-use the paper.
Take a hammer (nearly everyone has one of those) and smash the hard disk to destroy the platters. Hard disks are cheap enough to be expendable if they have "classified" or confidential information on them.
HIPAA should mandate drive destruction when the drive is no longer needed.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I uncovered porn and tons of what's now 'abandonware'. Thanks, 16-year old boy from 1996 (I assume)!
Wouldn't it have been quicker to say 50%?
and then bury them in the back yard and water em real good with a water hose, by the time somebody finds those they'll be as rusty as a pre WW2 jalopy
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Every 2nd hand hard disk I have ever acquired has had personal data on it. None of the previous owners had even attempted to delete the data all the filesystem pointers were intact. On the other hand none of them ever had any useful data on them, unless I wanted to embarrass the previous owner by sending their porn collection to their wife/parents.
My company donates quite a bit of good used computer equipment every year, but I am very careful to remove all drives and reformat them. With a drill bit.
I'd have guessed 9/10 would have data on them. Higher than that if you could real serious forensics and not just dripping the used drive in a reader.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I sold a hard drive which I purposely left full of pictures of my big dong. I believe that the new owner would benefit very much from seeing the bigness of my dong!
Since Windows Vista a full format using the standard Windows format command will wipe a hard drive by writing 0x00 to every cluster before rebuilding the file system areas.
See: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941961
A few years ago I resigned from a company on less than perfect terms. They took the laptop I had been using and sent it for forensic analysis (for some paranoid reason I can only guess). Anyway, the day before I left I had reformatted the drive and loaded Ubuntu to replace the Windows 2000 OS that was on there.
The report from the (so called) forensic lab was that I had 'used powerful encryption to hide the contents of the hard drive'. Hell, I didn't even use a proper overwrite format, just the fast format option.
So there you go. Either a 10 minute Linux install will beat a professional forensic investigation, or it's proof against fools. I favor the latter.
Some dodgy retailers in Australia have been re-shrink-wrapping used hard disks and selling them as new again.
Typically this seems to be with resellers that offer a 7-day money back no-quibble guarantee.
My files don't have any buttons. Should I be worried?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I bought a USB drive from PC World last year. Sold as new. Got it home, found that my Windows PC wouldn't recognise the file system - it was formatted, and I could see the hardware, but the drive wasn't showing up. Out of curiosity I hooked it up to a Linux machine and had a nose. Turns out it was HFS formatted. Not only that but it had someone's time machine backup on it.
So not only was the drive - probably illegally - sold as new when it was, in fact, second hand, but PC World hadn't even done a basic format of it.
Needless to say I returned it and gave the manager a bit of a hard time...
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
One cannot argue with ignorance. One has to understand that most people are arrogant and do not understand. That is not your fault, but what beggars belief is how these drives ended up in the wrong hands in the first place and why would you resell the drives as new?
All you have to do is the following;
1, Gutmann pass http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method
2, Then if you are not paranoid enough overwrite the drive with Zeros and you can do this Hiren's Boot CD.
The only forensics left is the serial number of the Hard Drive which is embedded and ties MAC/Hardware codes together!
Normally at this stage you might as well have done a good job of taking a hammer to it and then throwing thing the thing into a blast furnace.
Whilst I am at it http://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/solutions/cofee/default.aspx
This is what is used;
arp.exe -a /all /report %OUTFILE% /domain /query/v /svc
at.exe
autorunsc.exe
getmac.exe
handle.exe -a
hostname.exe
ipconfig.exe
msinfo32.exe
nbtstat.exe -n
nbtstat.exe -A 127.0.0.1
nbtstat.exe -S
nbtstat.exe -c
net.exe share
net.exe use
net.exe file
net.exe user
net.exe accounts
net.exe view
net.exe start
net.exe Session
net.exe localgroup administrators
net.exe localgroup
net.exe localgroup administrators
net.exe group
netdom.exe query DC
netstat.exe -ao
netstat.exe -no
openfiles.exe
psfile.exe
pslist.exe
pslist.exe -t
psloggedon.exe
psservice.exe
pstat.exe
psuptime.exe
quser.exe
route.exe print
sc.exe query
sc.exe queryex
sclist.exe
showgrps.exe
srvcheck \127.0.0.1
tasklist.exe
whoami.exe
Easily defeated! But COFEE is for brain dead law enforcement!
This is why I keep a small quantity of thermite handy. The only proper disposal for my hard drives is complete and utter destruction.
Nice. The 0 mod shows how few understood the joke.
It's siting at -1 now. Sad, there used to be a few nerds at slashdot who would appreciate a joke like that. But you know there are 10 kinds of people, those who know binary and those who don't.
Free Martian Whores!
Well, -1 is the largest possible unsigned score...
Since Windows Vista a full format in windows WILL wipe a drive.
See: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941961