Sanitizing old hard disks
Now, this article on hard disks thrown away or sold while still containing sensitive information is food for thought.
“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.”
via Boingboing.
Here goes yet another wish-list item for the next version of Windows. A scrub utility to truly erase sensitive data. Until a tool is freely available and easily visible to end users, awareness of the security implications is not going to do much good. The barrier for adopting better security practices is too high right now.
Posted on March 23rd, 2004 under Tech • 
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