[clug] An old debate: Forensics study of cleaning old disk drives sold on e-bay

Karun Dambiec kdambiec at ieee.org
Thu Feb 26 10:44:18 GMT 2009


It seems to be a reoccuring issue. Perhaps a study could be done into 
why this occurs especially in households.

If I sell my computer second hand I never sell it with the hard drive, 
or buy a new hard drive for it. 

Regards
Karun Dambiec

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 09:32:04PM +1100, steve jenkin wrote:
> An ongoing interest in this list:
> 
> <http://www.investigation.com/articles/library/2008articles/articles10.htm>
> 
> These people bought 100 drives old drives off e-bay and 40% contained
> 'sensitive' information.
> 
> They specifically didn't buy drives flagged as being 'erased'.
> 
> Most new SATA. Sizes 40-300Gb.
> 
> "Kessler International offered this breakdown of the kind of data it
> retrieved: Personal and confidential documents, including financial
> information, 36%; e-mails, 21%; photos, 13%; corporate documents. 11%;
> Web browsing histories, 11%; DNS server information, 4%; miscellaneous
> data, 4%."
> 
> "We were more concerned with searching for people's identification,
> which is what we found, but we were surprised by all the corporate
> spreadsheets and business finance records we found," Kessler said.
> 
> -- 
> Steve Jenkin, Info Tech, Systems and Design Specialist.
> 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
> PO Box 48, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
> 
> sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
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