TAMPA, Fla., June 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Computers may have sensitive data
that identity thieves would love to get their hands on. Magnets,
degaussers, and other x-ray or magnetic techniques do not work, even the
large bulk eraser magnets are not effective. Drilling, smashing, torching
and other external damage can still leave parts of the platters in decent
shape to retrieve data through forensics.
There are signs that people are not aware of the risk from discarded
drives. Last year, German encryption technology specialist Pointsec tested
hard drives bought on eBay to see if they still carried data and discovered
that seven out of every 10 devices it tested still bore readable
information.
That study followed similar research published in 2003 by graduate
students Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat, who found that only 12 of the
129 working computer hard drives they bought in secondhand stores and on
the auction site eBay had been adequately cleansed of sensitive data from
their previous owners.
"You have all kinds of data being stored in the hard drive, in the Web
browser and in application files, and these are all affected by the same
problem -- you delete something on the computer, but it doesn't really ever
get deleted completely," said Garfinkel, a doctoral candidate at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"You have to distinguish between deleting occasional files and truly
wiping a machine clean," he added. "There's really a significant
difference."
The first step for many people would be a low-level reformatting of the
operating system on their PC, even though doing that with Microsoft's
Windows or Apple Computer's Mac OS operating systems won't destroy data
completely, experts said.
"What we've seen with a lot of clients is that they think that
reformatting a drive gets rid of the data, and that's just not true," said
Kathy Ferguson, a business unit manager with IBM's Asset Recovery Solutions
Group. "In a typical scenario, that only overwrites partitions, or sectors
of data. At the end of the day, you can recover that data readily if you
have the right tools."
Contact:
Microstar Computers
http://www.harddrive-data-erase-destroy-sanitize.com /
906 N. Dale Mabry
Tampa, FL 33609
Phone: 813-876-8900
info@microstar.net
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