The other night I received a call from a friend. He told me that he had bought a new computer and asked what he should do with his old one. Some of his ideas were to donate it to charity, sell it on eBay, or throw it in the garbage.
As an Information Security person, I told him these were all good ideas but told him to think about his data. Primarily, did he want the new owner or recipient of the computer to have all his information from the hard drive? As soon as I mentioned that, I could hear the “oops” through the phone.
I began to tell him about a friend of mine who worked with the local news to show what could happen if you didn’t get rid of your data before you gave/sold your computer. I went on to tell him that they had my friend purchase two hard drives from eBay. They then had him look at the drives and tell him what he found. It turns out that he was able to find some financial information from one and the other had photos of the last owner’s child.
My friend then asked me, what’s the best way to make sure the data is destroyed? I told him there were a couple of choices. One would be to use a product called BCWipe. This product performs the Department of Defense standard for thoroughly erasing the disk. The other would be to take the drive out of the computer and repeatedly hit it with a sledge hammer until it was beaten beyond use.
Anyways, be careful of your information when getting rid of old computers.
Jeff Gibson
Vulnerability Management, Compliance & Forensics Analyst
Westfield Group
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