- In this report
- Overview
- Phishing
- Viruses
- Spam
- Spyware
- Social networking
- A safer net
- How criminals deceive
- Where criminals plot
- State of the Net
- Properly erasing hard drives
- Ways to stay safe online
- Canadian online security
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September 2007
What your hard drive can tell ID thieves
Many people believe that when they dispose of their old computer, the files they've erased from the hard drive are gone forever.
Wrong. We bought a handful of drives on eBay and tried to recover old files by running simple and inexpensive software that
anyone can obtain and use.
Here's what we found: a Microsoft Word tax document that included annual salary information; Quicken files filled with income and expense data; a MySpace account name and password; e-mail from Outlook Express; love letters; photographs; and lists of favorite Web sites. (We later erased that personal data permanently.)
Most of the drives we bought for our hard drive security experiment were described by the sellers as either reformatted or wiped clean. With many of those drives, we easily pulled data in a wide variety of commonly used file formats.
This isn't an isolated case. Simson Garfinkel, now a research fellow at Harvard University, has examined more than 1,200 hard drives for projects he conducted at MIT and Harvard and found only a third to one half of them were properly cleaned.
This hard drive security problem is widespread: No recent version of either Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X offers a fast and convenient way to securely erase individual files or an entire hard drive. To securely erase your hard drive in Windows, Microsoft recommends using third-party software.
Mac OS X has a hard drive security feature that can permanently erase the Trash contents. But it's slow; erasing 3GB of data took us about 9 minutes. Mac OS X, version 10.3 or later, can permanently erase an entire drive.
Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, believes that consumers should be able to securely erase files and entire hard drives, within a reasonable time period, using the operating system that came with their computer. There's no practical reason why Microsoft and Apple can't offer this hard drive security capability.
What you can do. To securely erase selected files from a Windows computer, use Eraser (free at www.heidi.ie/eraser). It can expunge temporary files as well as those you've moved to the Recycle Bin, and can also erase an entire drive.
Here's what we found: a Microsoft Word tax document that included annual salary information; Quicken files filled with income and expense data; a MySpace account name and password; e-mail from Outlook Express; love letters; photographs; and lists of favorite Web sites. (We later erased that personal data permanently.)
Most of the drives we bought for our hard drive security experiment were described by the sellers as either reformatted or wiped clean. With many of those drives, we easily pulled data in a wide variety of commonly used file formats.
This isn't an isolated case. Simson Garfinkel, now a research fellow at Harvard University, has examined more than 1,200 hard drives for projects he conducted at MIT and Harvard and found only a third to one half of them were properly cleaned.
This hard drive security problem is widespread: No recent version of either Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X offers a fast and convenient way to securely erase individual files or an entire hard drive. To securely erase your hard drive in Windows, Microsoft recommends using third-party software.
Mac OS X has a hard drive security feature that can permanently erase the Trash contents. But it's slow; erasing 3GB of data took us about 9 minutes. Mac OS X, version 10.3 or later, can permanently erase an entire drive.
Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, believes that consumers should be able to securely erase files and entire hard drives, within a reasonable time period, using the operating system that came with their computer. There's no practical reason why Microsoft and Apple can't offer this hard drive security capability.
What you can do. To securely erase selected files from a Windows computer, use Eraser (free at www.heidi.ie/eraser). It can expunge temporary files as well as those you've moved to the Recycle Bin, and can also erase an entire drive.
