Posted on 07/11/2004 2:08:35 AM PDT by Stoat
Thousands of students, staff and alumni of a tony Upper East Side design school were put at risk of identify theft and possible bankruptcy after school computers containing their personal info were dumped on the sidewalk.
As many as 10 computers were found abandoned outside the New York School of Interior Design on East 70th Street on June 17 and handed over to The Post.
One hard drive revealed files containing more than 15,000 Social Security, credit-card and phone numbers plus staffers' salaries, academic transcripts, dates of birth and student ID photos.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Many folks forget to wipe the HD before dumping a computer. A format is not good enough. You must wipe the drive. 7 times is the standard. 35 times if you really want it clean. LOL!
Yes, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the drives on these machines were not wiped at all.
This is magical, breathtaking stupidity at a spectacular level for the average citizen to do this. For an expensive school to do this is utterly beyond belief.
I have no doubt that they will feel this in their pocketbooks in the months to come.
The IQ must be very high in that area
Yes indeed :-)
This sort of thing brings to my mind the condescension that so many on the left have for the supposed lack of intelligence on the part of conservatives. My guess is that this school would not exactly be easily defined as a "bastion of conservative thought" and they pull something like this that most any trailer-park family that the Left loves to lampoon as being an example of "redneck conservative" would never even think of doing.
They have so much egg on their face with this that it will take a bulldozer to scrape it off :-)
Little reason to save them - an old disk is worthless, given how fast the densities have been increasing.
I've done some computer repairs at both the KC Federal Reserve Bank, and the Lake City Army Ammunition factory, and in both cases, if a hard drive is removed from a computer that holds (or for that matter, ever held) sensative data, "wiping" the drive isn't enough. The drive actually goes through a metal shredder! I've had supervisors a bit upset when they found out that they would have to pay for a new hard drive (at a highly inflated price) when they wanted a replacement drive under warranty, without sending back the "core."
Mark
Many folks forget to wipe the HD before dumping a computer.
I keep getting surprised by what people *don't* know about their computers.
Last week, the wife of a builder I work for called me, all upset because she had "deleted" some files she needed "from her hard drive." I stopped by on my way home and removed it, took it to my house to run a recovery utility on it and search for the files in question. I found them ... IN THE RECYCLE BIN!
This woman has been using computers for years, uses one every day to do accounting for their construction business and for her sideline business selling digital photos she takes at their kids' sports events. So, when she said "deleted..hard drive" I naturally assumed she knew what she was saying. Her recycle bin had 2G+ junk in it. She had apparently never emptied it before.
Not saying she's stupid, in fact she is definitely NOT stupid. It's just that most people use their computer like a TV, and learn about it only on a need-to-know basis.
Less then five minutes with an electric screw driver and a few small torx bits will get you some very nice magnets!
The old 5.25 Micropolis full height had the best magnets (IMO).
Norton security wipe and others will do the job, but what fun is that!
Further information is available from Google queries for hd+wipe and hd+erase.
For Linux users, no purchase is necessary. Delete all partitions and use the "dd" tool to overwrite the whole drive - multiple times. (I believe the DoD standard is 7 overwrites).
But keep in mind that the only sure way to destroy all of the residual data is to totally destroy the hardware.
"Whoever did that is an idiot . . . It's really sloppy. I could understand it from a fly-by-night school, but this is the Harvard of design colleges."
Their brilliance leaves me speechless as I roll my eyes.
Isn't academia grand!
I am afraid many folks don't think to wipe the drive before either dumping or selling a computer.
Indeed. :-) However, a quick wipe (at least 4 hours if its a big drive LOL) makes less noise! :-)
Little reason to save them - an old disk is worthless, given how fast the densities have been increasing.
And the trend goes on. :-) Nothing (at least on our size and scale) ages faster than a computer.
Big time! The government has very specific rules about distruction of media.
If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear by letting the Authorities have your personal information.
I know the feeling about stuffed to the gills with obsolete computers. :-)
There are lots of programs out there that can wipe a drive.
This is a good read:
http://www.simson.net/clips/2003.CSO.04.Hard_disk_risk.htm
Here is a nice free tool. :-)
Those are rare earth magnets. Pretty nice ones as well. :-)
Drives are cheap. Data is precious.
Take your old drive to the rifle range for some practice.
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