A college professor once told me, “Don’t leave old hard drives or disk out in the trash, data miners pay a lot of money for information that’s left dormant on these drives”. Apparently what this professor said couldn’t have been truer. According to
JUSTIN POPE of sfgate.com Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat of MIT purchased 159 used hard drives, of which they were able to harvest personal information from 49 of the drives. Using rough numbers it’s plain to see that of the supposed 150,000 retired hard drives of the past year a third of the drives contain personal information that can be used by every one from thieves and identity thieves to shady marketing companies like Double Click. The point I’m trying to make is that if the general public practiced safe and secure computing habits these problems wouldn’t exist. If the drives had been over written by one of the more then
40 programs available the information that was once contained on these drives would no longer exist. In fact older versions of tool included in Norton utilities called “speed disk” had an option to over write a hard drive after defragmenting, what a novel concept.
