It's Scary How Much Personal Data People Leave on Used Laptops and Phones, Researcher Finds (gizmodo.com)

A recent experiment by Josh Frantz, a senior security consultant at Rapid7, suggests that users are taking few if any steps to protect their private information before releasing their used devices back out into the wild. From a report: For around six months, he collected used desktop, hard disks, cellphones and more from pawn shops near his home in Wisconsin. It turned out they contain a wealth of private data belonging to their former owners, including a ton of personally identifiable information (PII) -- the bread and butter of identity theft. Frantz amassed a respectable stockpile of refurbished, donated, and used hardware: 41 desktops and laptops, 27 pieces of removable media (memory cards and flash drives), 11 hard disks, and six cellphones. The total cost of the experiment was a lot less than you'd imagine. "I visited a total of 31 businesses and bought whatever I could get my hands on for a grand total of around $600," he said.

Frantz used a Python-based optical character recognition (OCR) tool to scan for Social Security numbers, dates of birth, credit card information, and other sensitive data. And the result was, as you might expect, not good. The pile of junk turned out to contain 41 Social Security numbers, 50 dates of birth, 611 email accounts, 19 credit card numbers, two passport numbers, and six driver's license numbers. Additionally, more than 200,000 images were contained on the devices and over 3,400 documents. He also extracted nearly 150,000 emails.

Comments

I bought a used laptop on eBay once

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

Used to belong to a tax accounting firm.
Fully functioning. Over 100k tax return forms still on the system.
*Everything*, was still there. Names, SSNs, tax id records, addresses, everything.

It's a damn good thing I was honest and DBAN'd that drive immediately.
I contacted the seller and told him this.
Never heard back...

Links Back to Earlier Article

[ytene]

Yesterday, BeauHD posted an article related to the fact that California is re-introducing right-to-repair legislation, which, believe it or not, is related to this topic.

If I can open a slot on the bottom of my laptop and easily replace the internal storage drive (on my PS/3 and PS/4 doing this requires removal of one screw), then I can be 100% certain that I am not leaking data if I sell on my old device. Yes, OK, I still have to buy a new drive and maybe re-install the OS on it, but these are simple enough tasks these days.

With the advent of devices with integrated storage, often soldered on to motherboards, this becomes impossible. What this now means is that the original manufacturer would have to come up with a way to *guarantee* you that all data on embedded storage had been securely wiped. Otherwise, their failure to do that, coupled with negligent design or negligent security implementations, could result in the loss of your personal data.

I wonder how many smartphone/tablet/similar device manufacturers would be willing to step up and own that liability in return for being able to prevent you from upgrading or repairing your device. I'm betting not that many.

Used Laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

I buy a lot of used laptops from people to refurbish and give to local schools that don't have the money to buy them.

I am appalled at what I find on them.

One time I got (they were donated) 10 used IBM Thinkpads from a criminal law firm in town. They did absolutely nothing to purge the hard drives of sensitive client information. All of their files were intact, unencrypted, just sitting in My Documents.

I called them to tell them what they had done and they didn't care one iota. Unbelievable. I could probably have reported them to the State Bar, and probably SHOULD have. But, one thing I've learned is, don't poke an alligator with a stick.

I ended up just nuking them all from orbit with DBAN and continuing about my business.