Haunted By Ghosts Of Hard Drives Past

www.cbsnews.com ^ | Jan. 16, 2003 | By Justin Pope

[runningbear]

CBSNEWS: Haunted By Ghosts Of Hard Drives Past

Simson Garfinkel, a graduate student at the MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, holds a used hard drive he bought containing personal information. (AP)

Haunted By Ghosts Of Hard Drives Past

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 16, 2003

"People will think they have deleted the file, they can't find the file themselves and that the file is gone when, in fact, forensically you may be able to retrieve it."
Tom Aleman Deloitte & Touche

(AP) So, you think you cleaned all your personal files from that old computer you got rid of?

Two MIT graduate students suggest you think again.

Over two years, Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat bought 158 used hard drives at secondhand computer stores and on eBay. Of the 129 drives that functioned, 69 still had recoverable files on them and 49 contained "significant personal information" - medical correspondence, love letters, pornography and 5,000 credit card numbers. One even had a year's worth of transactions with account numbers from a cash machine in Illinois.

About 150,000 hard drives were "retired" last year, according to the research firm Gartner Dataquest. Many end up in the trash, but many also find their way back onto the market.

Over the years, stories have surfaced about personal information turning up on used hard drives, raising concerns about privacy and the danger of identity theft.

Last spring, Pennsylvania sold used computers that contained information about state employees. In 1997, a Nevada woman bought a used computer and discovered it contained prescription records on 2,000 customers of an Arizona pharmacy.

Garfinkel and Shelat, who reported their findings in an article to be published Friday in the journal IEEE Security & Privacy, said they believe they are the first to take a more comprehensive - though not exactly scientific - look at the problem.

On common operating systems such as Microsoft's Windows, simply deleting a file, or even following that up by emptying the "trash" folder, does not necessarily make the information irretrievable. Those commands generally delete a file's name from the directory. But the information itself can live on until it is overwritten by new files.

[runningbear]

I gather that just deleting the internet cache files, and cookies it not enough? And that hard drive reformatting is not good enough either? I then take it that the only way to loose data, is destroy the drive completely! ;o)

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[DainBramage]

I then take it that the only way to loose data, ;o)

Or you could set it free in Silicon Valley or Taiwan, where it was born.

[SkyPilot]

I'll take rintense's advice if I ever want to clunk an old computer----a magnet and sledgehammer.

[Leisler]

What's a "hard drive"? Should I upgrade from twin 5 1/4" floppies?

[error99]

"...the information itself can live on until it is overwritten by new files..."

There are several commercially available utilities that handle this automatically.

[runningbear]

if you need some floppies, I have some...lol..
I found this 3.5 floppy in the garbage many years ago, had info may or may not be sensitive to where I work. Brought it up to the attention of the higher ups, and had the department head destroy it in front of me.....lol... He thought nothing to it!!! Geezish!!!

[runningbear]

sledgehammer will do for me... lol...

[HiTech RedNeck]

A quick format will not suffice for privacy because it overwrites only a small section of the disk. A full format is pretty effective for privacy purposes because it overwrites everything. After a full format, the drive would have to be disassembled and analyzed with special equipment in a special environment for there to be even a chance of getting anything back. This is government spook level stuff. Not something a hacker, even a l33t one, would do in his or her garage.

[GOP_Proud]

Maybe I watch too much of Court TV and Forensic Files, but is this really news? I thought it was generally known that when you delete, you may not really "delete".

[Labyrinthos]

I then take it that the only way to loose data, is destroy the drive completely.

There are several freeware, shareware, and low priced programs that will kill the "deleted" data on the hard drive. My fave is "BCWipe" brought to you by the people make "PGP" encryption software.

[DB]

Single or double sided?

[Anarchist]

Does this mean punch cards are obsolete? Should I upgrade to magnetic tape?

[CanisMajor2002]

Nothing says data security like an abacus.

After calculating pi to 10 digits in 5 years, you can shake the sucker, and *whap* all the beads are over to the left, with no possible way to figure out where the beads were. :)

[Leisler]

Don't know, a grilled cheese and tomato got stuck in '92 and I haven't gotten it out since.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

I then take it that the only way to loose data, is destroy the drive completely! ;o)

A simpler way is to consider it absolutely critical, something you cannot afford to lose under any circumstances. Then, poof, it is gone forever.

[pollwatcher]

"Floppies?"

Are they better than my punch-cards?

[Semaphore Heathcliffe]

A few years ago (maybe still), MacOS came with a format option that included "zeroing" all data, which referred to writing of zeros to the entire drive. Thus overwriting any data left intact from previous format. Or that was the intent as I understood it.

[NYC GOP Chick]

After my hard drive had a meltdown last year and I replaced it, I took the old one apart and just wrecked it with a hammer, plier, etc.