Digital Home Thoughts: Buyers Scour eBay For Data-Rich Hard Drives

"Buyers on eBay troll the online auction site for used drives in the hope that the platters haven't been wiped clean and contain valuable data, including credit card numbers, a researcher said Monday. Simson Garfinkel, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard's Center for Research on Computation and Society, has been buying used hard drives on eBay since 2001, then analyzing the data he finds on some of the devices. Of the 236 drives Garfinkel bought, 7 contained more than 300 recoverable credit card numbers; one from had more than 11,000 unique account numbers that he could retrieve. That's because only 19 percent of drives he acquired had been wiped clean. The majority of previous owners had either not touched the drives or had only run the DOS commands FDISK and FORMAT, which actually leave data on the drive so users with simple diagnostic tools can read the information."

A bit off-topic, but I thought it would be a good reminder to anyone that's selling old hard drives when upgrading, or if you're selling/giving away old PCs that were once used to store important data. I use Acronis Privacy Expert which works nicely. I have a boot CD it created that I use to overwrite the hard drive with 0's and 1's, over several passes, which destroys all data. Protect your data at all costs, especially when you're giving it away on a used hard drive!