E-Bay hard-drives hold plenty of secrets

[Ian]

On average, 70% of re-sold hard-drives and memory cards contain pornographic material according to research carried out on 1,000 hard-drives over the course of a year by Disklabs Data Recovery and Computer Forensics.

In addition, the company recently purchased a selection of storage media comprising of 100 hard-disk drives and 50 memory cards and proceeded to process a sample batch to test what data was still retrievable from them. The results were worrying as documents such as CVs and accounting spreadsheets (including names and mobile numbers) were easily accessible.

Perhaps even more worrying was the fact that many previous owners had not deleted temporary Internet files. This means that any new, unscrupulous owner could access personal financial details, such as credit card numbers and could then go on to order goods from Internet pages by simply changing the delivery address. Many of the sampled selection also contained pornographic matter.

It seems that very few people are aware that simply pressing the delete button does not necessarily mean that the data is destroyed and irretrievable. This research comes as a timely reminder to both consumers and businesses that data should be destroyed properly and not simply deleted or formatted, as this is not sufficient to completely erase stored data.

Disklabs have since contacted all of the owners of the hard-drives and memory cards that data was retrieved from to inform them that their old media still contained retrievable data. It must be stressed that all these storage devices have now all been properly wiped by 1st Computer Traders Ltd and the devices are now being used as spare parts for further data recovery tasks sent in to Disklabs Data Recovery and Computer Forensics Services.

 

[muckshifter]

... and "the how" to wipe

Yep ... I have great fun in reading someone elses mail.

It must be stressed that all these storage devices have now all been properly wiped by 1st Computer Traders Ltd

To effectively remove data from a hard drive, it must be overwritten completely several times. All of the temporary files, all of the caches, all of the “swap files” that are created as you work may be lurking in some unknown corner of the hard drive.

Contrary to popular belief, even reformatting the drive does not necessarily make file recovery impossible! I know, for Norton System Works 95 (DOS based) has "unformatted" a few drives for me.

There are free programs that will do an adequate job of wiping a hard drive clean ... although the data may still be recoverable by professionals with very expensive programs, and there are inexpensive programs that will make the data completely unrecoverable.

Here is one good at what it does.