Your Old Hard Drive Is a Criminal's Gold Mine
Whether we're throwing away an old computer, selling it to a friend or just replacing its aging hard drive, many of us are improperly erasing our sensitive personal data, if we're even bothering to erase it at all! These are the findings of a study performed by a multi-national coalition of research teams from U.K. teleco BT, the University of Glamorgan in Wales, the University in Perth in Australia, and Virginia's Longwood University here in the U.S. The researchers examined 350 hard drives received second-hand and found that more than a third of the disks had not been properly cleared of preexisting data.
The hard drives contained surprising mix of personal and corporate information such as bank and credit-card information, salary details, medical records and corporate financial data. The disks were purchased in a variety of places, both from online and brick-and-mortar retailers as well as at computer fairs and shows.
The ease of obtaining this information makes it a treasure trove for potential identity thieves. Users and businesses tend not to realize that deleting or simply formatting a hard disk doesn't actually remove all the data from the drive and that a dedicated hard drive cleaning application is needed.
Deleting or reformatting simply removes information about the location of files, meaning they're ready for overwriting, but until new data is written in the same physical location on the drive, the data is recoverable with freely-available utilities. Thankfully, there are also freely-available disk-cleaning apps that write over every area of the disk several times with random garbage data. Here are just a few:
- DBAN
- Undelete Free Disk Wipe
- Eraser
- Active@ Kill Disk Hard Drive Eraser
- ... more disk-erasing utilities
From New Scientist
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