A small article by the above title appeared in today's
New York Times, and is quoted below in its entirety. What is on your hard drive that would cause you problems if it got in someone else's hands? I can understand how this would be an important issue in the corporate world, and with industrial spies, but do we need to worry about such things?
Quote:Discarded Hard Drives May Still Tell Secrets
January 19, 2003
By VIVIAN MARINO
So you received a new PC over the holidays, and you're
planning to get rid of the old one. But have you carefully
inspected all the personal files on the hard drive? Simply
deleting them may not make them disappear.
Two M.I.T. graduate students, Simson Garfinkel and Abhi
Shelat, found this out in a two-year study. They said they
had bought 158 used hard drives at secondhand computer
stores and on eBay. Of the 129 drives that worked, they
said, 69 still had recoverable files and 49 contained
"significant personal information" like medical
correspondence, love letters and credit card numbers.
The students reported their findings in an article
published last week in the journal IEEE Security & Privacy.
On common operating systems like Microsoft Windows, simply
deleting a file, or even emptying the "trash" folder, does
not necessarily make the information irretrievable. The
information can live on until it is overwritten by new
files. Various software products are available for a more
thorough hard-drive cleanup.
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