redman Posted January 16, 2003 Share Posted January 16, 2003 From Yahoo! News: Personal Info Remains on Old Hard Drives Thu Jan 16,11:52 AM ET By JUSTIN POPE, AP Business Writer CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - So, you think you cleaned all your personal files from that old computer you got rid of? Two MIT graduate students suggest you think again. Over two years, Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat bought 158 used hard drives at secondhand computer stores and on eBay. Of the 129 drives that functioned, 69 still had recoverable files on them and 49 contained "significant personal information" — medical correspondence, love letters, pornography and 5,000 credit card numbers. One even had a year's worth of transactions with account numbers from a cash machine in Illinois. About 150,000 hard drives were "retired" last year, according to the research firm Gartner Dataquest. Many end up in the trash, but many also find their way back onto the market. Over the years, stories have surfaced about personal information turning up on used hard drives, raising concerns about privacy and the danger of identity theft. Last spring, Pennsylvania sold used computers that contained information about state employees. In 1997, a Nevada woman bought a used computer and discovered it contained prescription records on 2,000 customers of an Arizona pharmacy. Garfinkel and Shelat, who reported their findings in an article to be published Friday in the journal IEEE Security & Privacy, said they believe they are the first to take a more comprehensive — though not exactly scientific — look at the problem. On common operating systems such as Microsoft's Windows, simply deleting a file, or even following that up by emptying the "trash" folder, does not necessarily make the information irretrievable. Those commands generally delete a file's name from the directory. But the information itself can live on until it is overwritten by new files. Even reformatting a drive, or preparing the hard drive all over again to store files, may not do it. Fifty-one of the 129 working drives in the MIT study had been reformatted, and 19 of them still contained recoverable data. The hard-to-erase quality of hard drives is seen as a good thing by some. Many users like believing that, in a pinch, an expert could recover their deleted files. Law enforcement officers can examine a computer and lift incriminating e-mails or porno images from the hard drive. The only sure way to erase a hard drive is to "squeeze" it: writing over the old information with new data — all zeros, for instance — at least once, but preferably several times. A one-line command will do that for Unix (news - web sites) users, and for others, inexpensive software from companies such as AccessData works well. But few people go to the trouble. Many ordinary computer users toss their old drives into the closet, or take a sledgehammer to it. As it turned out, most of the hard drives acquired by the MIT students came from businesses that apparently had a misplaced confidence in their ability to "sanitize" old drives. Tom Aleman, who heads the analytic and forensic technology group at the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche, often encounters companies that get burned by failing to fully sanitize, say, the laptop of an employee who leaves the company for a job with a competitor. "People will think they have deleted the file, they can't find the file themselves and that the file is gone when, in fact, forensically you may be able to retrieve it," he said. Garfinkel has learned his lesson. As an undergrad at MIT in the 1980s, he failed to sanitize his own hard drive before returning a computer to his father. His father was able to read his personal journal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Evil Genius Posted January 16, 2003 Share Posted January 16, 2003 Better yet - at least reformat them before you give them away. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gbear Posted January 16, 2003 Share Posted January 16, 2003 I heard about that on NPR last night. Anybody got a good idea how to erase everything but the operating system without having to reinstall the operating system? I'm about to give my computer to a friend as I move in with my fiance (her compuer is better). I'd just assume erase everything but the operating system. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BG Posted January 16, 2003 Share Posted January 16, 2003 I have Norton anti-virus 2003 professional edition. It has a feature on it that adds a protected section to your recycle bin and it also has a feature where you can wipe free sapce on your hard drive. Anyone know if this can do the job? I am ultra-paranoid of someone getting my check card or credit card number. I had a someone in Arizona charging me $90 a month on my checkcard. The bank had figured that my checkcard nuber was obtained through the internet, from my isp. Since then I gave up dial up acess and went with cable. What's more is how much porn I have downloaded since then.........:laugh: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Evil Genius Posted January 16, 2003 Share Posted January 16, 2003 I would try this program --- BCWIPE http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/3000-2248-10009333.html It takes about 3-5 hours to run the seven sweep process...but its supposed to be a highly rated. EDIT: Notice that this might only be for WIN95/NT and ME - so you might have to do some searching for the other versions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaRock Posted January 16, 2003 Share Posted January 16, 2003 Yah..even if you format it..Info gets left behind. But that is a good precaution to for basic safety from any personal information getting out. :laugh: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheKurp Posted January 16, 2003 Share Posted January 16, 2003 If you have an ATA (IDE) harddrive, a low level format will permanently erase 100% of the data. On another note, for those of you who have digital cameras with compact flash cards, just because you "delete" the picture, it doesn't really mean it's deleted until another picture is taken and in effect, writes over the previous storage space on the card. However you'll need a card reader and some software to recover the *deleted* image. This came in real handy for me on a vacation last year. I took some pictures of women jumping naked off of a boat - with their permission of course. Well later, after sobering up, they decided they wanted to delete the pictures. I grudgingly complied. When I got home I decided to investigate if there was a way to recover those pictures. That's how I happened upon this discovery. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fansince62 Posted January 17, 2003 Share Posted January 17, 2003 teg is on the money. simple reformats (quick reformat) will only eliminate the FAT - not the data. generally, it is recommended that reformatting/zeroizing programs be run a minimum of six sweeps. note that file deletions carry risk. this just eliminates the the file pointers from the FAT. the data remains on disk. additionally, unless a file size exactly matches some multiple of the file system sector size, the extra space at the end of a file (slack space) will retain whatever is on disk - lot of criminals are caught this way. additionally, free space also retains whatever is on the disk until overwritten/purged. it helps to know what is going on with individual applications as well. MS Word, for instance: you may delete a sentence from a document you are working on. Well, if I remember correctly, Word maintains a buffer in its document header that preserves these sorts of edits. until the buffer is filled you risk possible unintended info spillage. and don't forget the recycle bin and temp file directories. forensics is pretty cool stuff. lota ways to recoever/reconstruct/guess what has been left on disk. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gstahl Posted January 18, 2003 Share Posted January 18, 2003 Honestly , I would open the drive and pull the platter out, bend it, hammer it, demagnitize it, etc. and throw it away. HD are so cheap these days, especially old ones that I would never sell or give away a old machine of mine with a drive in it. After working in the computer industry as a software engineer for years I do not trust the righting over it to stop a determined hacker. Just my 2 cents. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fansince62 Posted January 18, 2003 Share Posted January 18, 2003 gstahl........absolutely!!!! what kind of coding are you involved with? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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