A cautionary tale here by someone who buys used hard drives second-hand and unerases them, revealing their contents.
In fact, only 10 percent of the drives I purchased had been properly sanitized. Much of the data we found was truly shocking. One of the drives once lived in an ATM. It contained a year’s worth of financial transactions—including account numbers and withdrawal amounts—from a organization that had a legal requirement to not divulge such information. Two other drives contained more than 5,000 credit card numbers—it looked as if one had been inside a cash register. Another had e-mail and personal financial records of a 45-year-old fellow in Georgia. The man is divorced, paying child support and dating a woman he met in Savannah. And, oh yeah, he’s really into pornography.
And the sad thing is, it’s not all that difficult to find programs that will scrub disk data properly before disposal.
Maybe I should send this article to the folks at my help desk …
(via BoingBoing)