Second Hand Drives Spill Many Secrets

By Greg McNevin

February 13, 2009: New York-based computer forensics firm Kessler International has released the results of a study on second hand hard drives, saying that an alarming 40 percent of the drives it purchased off eBay were not wiped correctly.

Over the course of six months, the firm bought 100 second hand drives of various sellers throughout the US and Canada, expecting to find one or two still holding sensitive information. Instead, the firm ended up picking up forty drives containing business and personal information

"With size of the sample, I guess we were surprised with the percentage of disks that we found data on," says Michael Kessler, CEO of Kessler International. "We expected most of the drives to be wiped -- to find one or two disks with data. But 40 drives out of 100 is a lot."

"The average person who knows anything about computers could plug in these disks and just go surfing," says Kessler. "I know they found a guy's foot fetish on one disk. He'd been downloading loads and loads of stuff on feet. With what we got on that disk - his name, address and all of his contacts - it would have been extremely embarrassing if we were somebody who wanted to blackmail him."

Overall, Kessler says that personal and confidential documents (including financial information) made up 36 per cent of the information found, while email constituted 21 percent and corporate documents 11 percent.

”We were more concerned with searching for people's identification, which is what we found, but we were surprised by all the corporate spreadsheets and business finance records we found,” says Kessler.

Photos, web browsing histories and DNS server information also made up significant amounts of sensitive information recovered, highlighting the need for both businesses and individuals to take more care when disposing of IT equipment and do more than just hit the delete key when erasing sensitive data.

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