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Hard-Disk Risk

CSO Magazine:
In fact, only 10 percent of the drives I purchased had been properly sanitized.

Much of the data we found was truly shocking. One of the drives once lived in an ATM. It contained a year's worth of financial transactions—including account numbers and withdrawal amounts—from a organization that had a legal requirement to not divulge such information. Two other drives contained more than 5,000 credit card numbers—it looked as if one had been inside a cash register. Another had e-mail and personal financial records of a 45-year-old fellow in Georgia. The man is divorced, paying child support and dating a woman he met in Savannah. And, oh yeah, he's really into pornography.

Abhi and I published our findings earlier this year in IEEE Security and Privacy journal. The story got a lot of media attention. It seems that many people have heard that some used computers still have confidential information on their hard drives, but few suspected the scale of the problem.

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