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BBC Says Destroy Your Hard Drive Before Selling Computer

By baratunde

Categories: General Tags: Computers, Data, Office Space, Security, YouTube.

My friend Dahni-El just emailed me this story from the BBC

Computing magazine Which? recovered 22,000 “deleted” files from eight computers purchased on eBay. Criminals source old computers from internet auction sites or in rubbish tips, to find users’ valuable details. Freely available software can be used to recover files that users think they have permanently deleted.

The only solution, according to Which?, is complete destruction - and it recommends using a hammer.

I don’t know about a hammer, but how about a baseball bat, a high kick and some Geto Boys? Pretty hot. I can now enact this scene in the name of computer security

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Dahni-El 5 months ago 1 point
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Several years ago, I suffered a catastrophic loss of data. I thought all was lost and contemplated the perverse bankrupt millionaire seppuku. Then I calmed myself down and searched the internet for answers and found a program that allowed me to search the clusters to find and piece everything back together over a few hours. Amazing!

I would add that I think there are a number of free programs (at least for windows) that will provide an unrecoverable wipe (especially if you reformat the drive afterward).

But maybe if we all jumped onto cloud computers, we wouldn't have this problem. Elephant Drive here we come! (Shameless friend promotion!)

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Kenya 5 months ago 1 point
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I agree with Dahni-El. A full disk wipe (not a reformat) is sufficient to destroy all data on the drive. As far as Windows tools, be careful what you use because most of the tools available online (especially the free ones) don't do exactly what they say they do. With a Mac or anything else Unix-based, a carefully constructed dd command can do this for you.

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Vincent 5 months ago 1 point
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For most practical purposes, the full disk wipe will effectively destroy the data. That is, it will make it costly and annoying enough that no one will spend the time/energy/money it takes to do a recovery of data on your old drive -- unless they have a really compelling reason. If, however, a technically sophisticated and well-financed adversary (e.g. a corporation or state-actor with a reason to actually want to recover data) you will need to wipe and rewrite multiple times to have any real security. Again, for most of us this is a ridiculous scenario.

In any event, using encryption on your local disk (or with a service like elephantdrive as Dahni-El suggests) will make it much more secure and difficult to recover, with or without wiping.

For more, see:

http://lifehacker.com/software/utilities/how-to...
http://www.crn.com/security/202805361
http://www.elephantdrive.com

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baratunde aka jack turner 5 months ago 1 point
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dang. thanks everybody! i feel smarter

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SEO Bacolod 5 months ago 1 point
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Thanks for the info. I feel bad now for I sold around 4 personal laptops (usually to friends) and all I did was just delete my data and empty the recycle bin. =(

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