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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.
So it will be the vendor or its employees selling your data instead. Or perhaps the government will force them to scan for any terrorist plots you might have been concocting before forcing them to wipe the drives.
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."
That would increase what I pay for hard disks.
A shot with a hammer is cheaper than postage. Boom, done.
"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)!
Taking a hammer to them is too much effort. A single pass of "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd" will utterly destroy all the data beyond any hope of recovery.
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.
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
Let's say a typical drive is 100GB and writes at 100MB/s. That will average over 15 minutes to write zeros to every sector on the drive. The destructive throughput of a hammer is pretty fast compared to that.
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.
this is not true.
on a raid5, you can have the disks arranged like: ... ... XOR diskN-1
disk1: data, AS IS
disk2: more data, AS IS
diskN: disk1 XOR disk2 XOR
diskN is quite useless to get the data, but the other disks contain the data the way it is.