By Darren Allan
A new study has shown that people selling on their old used hard drives or SSDs aren’t taking the proper precautions to fully wipe their data from them, with the obvious danger that the buyer may be able to access their personal information – or indeed corporate data in some cases.
This revelation was made by Blancco Technology Group in a report entitled ‘The Leftovers: A Data Recovery Study’, which examined some 200 drives purchased from eBay and Craigslist (93% of those were hard drives, the remainder SSDs).
Blancco’s digital forensics experts then set to work on the drives and were able to recover at least some residual data from no less than 78% of these pieces of hardware. 67% of the used drives held personally identifiable data, and perhaps even more worryingly, 11% of them still held sensitive corporate data that could be extracted.
The forensics experts were able to extract company emails from 9% of drives, spreadsheets including things like sales projections from 5%, and actual customer data from 3%.
As for the personal information gleaned, photos were recovered from 43% of the drives, social security numbers from 23%, financial data from 21%, and CVs from 10%.
That’s a lot of …read more
Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components
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