Used Hard Drives Still Haven For Identify Theft

Sellers are currently offering 3807 used hard drives on eBay.com alone. Add 5303 used desktop PCs, 975 Apple Desktops and thousands of other used devices like digital cameras or mobile phones that might contain data that has not been properly deleted by its previous owner. According to Techradar 66% of the used hard drives were not properly erased and contained personal data from the previous owner. It’s hard to pinpoint the validity of the number because the article fails to mention the amount of hard drives that have been tested.

The figure means that 66 used hard drives out of 100 sold would contain data data about the previous owner. Half of that number would still mean that every third used hard drive sold would contain personal data. The figures seem to grow worth instead of better with every passing year. Researchers seem to concentrate on hard drives but digital cameras or mobile phones might reveal the same amount of information including personal pictures, documents, contacts and even credit card or bank account information.

How can users protect themselves and their data? The easiest way would be to stop selling used hardware that contained data at one point. That solution is not always practicable though.

The user should make sure to make the data on the storage device unrecoverable. One of the best tools for that purpose is Eraser which can be used to clear the free disk space so that the files “underneath” cannot be recovered with file recovery software anymore.

Any tips that you might want to add? Let me know.

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Tags: data theft, ebay, hard-drives, identify, identity theft, most recently used, used hard drives
Categories: Security

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2 Responses to “Used Hard Drives Still Haven For Identify Theft”

1. my-t-man says:

   November 8, 2008 at 8:08 pm

   Another excellent way to securely erase a hard drive is Darik’s Boot-n-nuke, D-ban for short. I would like you to know this is one of my favorite sites. Keep up the good work.

   Reply
2. venkat says:

   November 9, 2008 at 6:37 am

   @my-t-man yes DBAN is the tool erase data completely without any traces to recover.

   Reply