Are you giving your personal info away?
Contributed by: Email on 04/26/2012 04:08 PM
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How sure are you the hard drive you just sold with your old computer does not have any personal info on it? Would you believe that one in ten still hold personal info, such as bank statements, passports and medical details?
A study in the U.K. purchased some 200 hard drives, 20 memory sticks and 10 mobile phones from primarily online auction sites in December 2010. Some also came from computer trade shows. The residuals left on phones and memory sticks was negligible, but not so the hard drives.
Using widely available freeware forensic tools, a team found more than half (52 percent) of the hard drives were unreadable or had been wiped of data. The remaining 48 percent still contained information, 11 percent of which held personal or corporate data. According to the report, 34,000 files holding both corporate and personal data were found.
Added Paul Vlissidis, technical director at NCC Group, in a published report: "This isnt a case of scaremongering, or using sophisticated techniques only available to large organizations. We purposefully used simple, easily sourced forensics processes and tools, to demonstrate that any information we accessed could also easily be stolen by people of criminal intent. It's sobering to think that nearly half of the used devices on the market contain personal information up for grabs."
Pressing the delete button is not enough!!
An ICO Web page outlines different ways for companies and consumers to wipe their drives clean before they donate or dispose of computers, mobile phones or portable storage devices. They include physical destruction, secure software deletion, factory setting restoration, outsourcing and reformatting.
You can also just use freeware such as HardWipe 2.
A study in the U.K. purchased some 200 hard drives, 20 memory sticks and 10 mobile phones from primarily online auction sites in December 2010. Some also came from computer trade shows. The residuals left on phones and memory sticks was negligible, but not so the hard drives.
Using widely available freeware forensic tools, a team found more than half (52 percent) of the hard drives were unreadable or had been wiped of data. The remaining 48 percent still contained information, 11 percent of which held personal or corporate data. According to the report, 34,000 files holding both corporate and personal data were found.
"NCC was pleasantly surprised to find that in the case of bulk purchases, most vendors had taken steps to securely erase the data," the report said. "However, there were concerns about the amount of data found on many of the individually purchased drives. Although some action had been taken in a number of cases (such as deleting drive partitions), this was not enough to ensure that the personal data was unrecoverable."
Added Paul Vlissidis, technical director at NCC Group, in a published report: "This isnt a case of scaremongering, or using sophisticated techniques only available to large organizations. We purposefully used simple, easily sourced forensics processes and tools, to demonstrate that any information we accessed could also easily be stolen by people of criminal intent. It's sobering to think that nearly half of the used devices on the market contain personal information up for grabs."
Pressing the delete button is not enough!!
An ICO Web page outlines different ways for companies and consumers to wipe their drives clean before they donate or dispose of computers, mobile phones or portable storage devices. They include physical destruction, secure software deletion, factory setting restoration, outsourcing and reformatting.
You can also just use freeware such as HardWipe 2.
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