"Old hard drives yield data bonanza"

spod

Old hard drives yield data bonanza
Interesting news.com article on data recovered from second hand harddrives

The IEEE Security & Privacy article it mentions makes for an interesting read.

Just thought some of you might have been interested based on the recent "rotton pron" thread.

JohnK

Interesting. I'm amazed that people would be so careless.

theciscokid

:eek:

by the way is there any list of car boot sales that take place in dublin ?

Occidental

Great idea for a project.

I'd put a fair bet that the percentage of drives in Ireland with readable data would be a lot higher.

JohnK

I'd say your right. Anytime I've been in a business most employees are hard pressed to open word and the "admin" is hardly any better. At the least going though some of the HD's could provide some entertainment

Dawg

Most places I've worked were full of ppl either clueless or just couldn't give a toss. Reckon the percentage of sensitive information still intact would be much higher over here.

Tip - format drive, re-install windows plus some crappy webcam. Set the cam to record video uncompressed - point at wall and start recording. Watch hard-disk space disappear at rapid pace.
Result - completely overwritten hard-disk in no time.

Just as handy to remove disk and bash with hammer several times tho, not to mention great stress relief

ozpass

At a company I used to work for we'd occasionally get requests to destroy the contents of hard drives. As the spare parts potential of the old drives was pretty low, we put them in a cement mixer with a few bricks. After half an hour there'd be nothing but twisted wiry bits and filings. Wouldn't hold out much hope of recovering THAT data.

PiE

5000 CC numbers? I know I wouldn't be telling anyone I'd found 'em :]

On a side-note...

Simson Garfinkel

...can not be a real name :]

ecksor

Simson Garfinkel has written/co-written a good few books.

yossarin

some good tunes too

malico

we are not talking about the same simon garfunkel!

happydude13

If you want to be sure that information cannot be retrieved from a hard drive then the FBI reccomendation is that the drive be filled twenty times with random data. Only filling it once or twice might stop the casual browser but forensics will still be able to get at it.

Or so I have heard.

malico

Honestly ythe best and easiest solution I've found is th just open the drive up (With a screwdriver, or drill if screwdriver not around) and place the disc plates in a saliene (salt water) solution. It corrodes the metal in about a day or so. Very much unreadable.

But that said, what the hell do you have on your computer that you want no-one else to see... hiding somethign are we!

PiE

Originally posted by ecksor
Simson Garfinkel has written/co-written a good few books.

Ah-a! So it's an alias he uses. Must be.

spod

SimSon Garfinkel, a different person to the famous pair of musicians Simon and Garfunkel.

http://www.simson.net/pubs.php lists some of the books written by Simson Garfinkel.

As for Simon and Garfunkel I'm not a fan but the dmoz category might be a good starting point.

SouperComputer

the saline theory sounds interesting. Although as someone said earlier, even if you put a drill through a drive, data can still be taken from it.

LLf's are a pain in the ass and take too long

stick em in a furnace!

seamus

Just like the webcam idea, someone could write a small prog that fills up every single byte of space in the drive with garbage........prolly wouldn't take that long to do.......

SouperComputer

even if you did that it still has to write to all the clusters and it will take a good while even on a pissy 10Gb drive

even then, what you are writing is a magnetic flux. A weak signal of the older data still remains and so ideally you should write over it a few times to be sure.

what a pain in the ass