[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Hard drive article
This guy talks about erasing your hard drive and giving it away, but worse
yet, what if you bought a used one with child porn on it?
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/usatoday/20030206/tc_usatoday/4842883
'Erased' hard drives can bite you
Thu Feb 6, 7:45 AM ET
Jefferson Graham USA TODAY
Imagine this chilling scenario: You buy a new PC and donate the old one to
charity, knowing you've protected your privacy by deleting all your old
files -- or better yet, reformatting the hard drive and wiping it clean.
Yet you later discover you're a victim of identity theft: Your Social
Security (news - web sites) number, driver's license ID, credit card account
information and tax records all were retrieved from the old hard drive.
Far-fetched? Not really, Simson Garfinkel says. The privacy expert and MIT
grad student recently bought 158 old hard drives on eBay as an experiment
with fellow student Abhi Shelat to see how much data was recoverable. Their
findings: More than 5,000 credit card numbers, financial and medical
records, personal e-mail and pornography were easily obtainable on the
drives.
''People need to understand that when they throw away a hard disk, they have
to take extreme measures to properly sanitize it,'' Garfinkel says. ''If
they don't, there's nothing to prevent someone from accessing that
information.''
What makes this whole scenario even scarier is this sad fact: The
information on a hard drive is a lot like Jason in Friday the 13th. You keep
on killing it, and you think it's truly gone, but the data are never truly
at rest.
''As long as the hard drive is working, there's nothing you can do short of
taking a sledgehammer to it to make sure the data are really gone,'' says
Ben Carmitchel of ESS Data Recovery. ''For every technology developed to
erase the data, it's our job to counter that.''
Carmitchel spends his weeks trying to recover hard drives supplied by
businesses -- drives that have been subjected to fires, floods and
lightning. The process can take 40 to 50 hours for each hard disk and can
cost businesses $300 to $2,000. ''This isn't the sort of thing that anyone
can do,'' he says.
But many, as Garfinkel and Shelat proved, are getting good at it. Even those
non-professionals found that with 51 of the hard drives that were clean, 19
had easily recoverable data.
The Federal Trade Commission recently reported that complaints about
identity theft nearly doubled in 2002. Last week a bill was introduced in
the Senate to make the process tougher, partly by shielding information that
can be shared on the Internet.
And if you've been keeping up with the news, the almost weekly barrage of
images of notable figures (the most recent being The Who's Pete Townshend)
on child porn charges relating to images they might have viewed or had
housed on their computers points to the potential dilemma shared by millions
in terms of deleting data.
_________________________________________________________________
Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail