Hard drive article

["L. Bird" <pkeets@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.




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