...you never know what you could find...

Quote:Computer hard drive sold on eBay 'had details of top secret U.S. missile defence system'

Highly sensitive details of a US military missile air defence system were found on a second-hand hard drive bought on eBay.

The test launch procedures were found on a hard disk for the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) ground to air missile defence system, used to shoot down Scud missiles in Iraq.

The disk also contained security policies, blueprints of facilities and personal information on employees including social security numbers, belonging to technology company Lockheed Martin - who designed and built the system.

British researchers found the data while studying more than 300 hard disks bought at computer auctions, computer fairs and eBay.

The experts also uncovered other sensitive information including bank account details, medical records, confidential business plans, financial company data, personal id numbers, and job descriptions.

The drives were bought from the UK, America, Germany, France and Australia by BT's Security Research Centre in collaboration with the University of Glamorgan in Wales, Edith Cowan University in Australia and Longwood University in the US.

A spokesman for BT said they found 34 per cent of the hard disks scrutinised contained 'information of either personal data that could be identified to an individual or commercial data identifying a company or organisation.'

And researchers said a 'surprisingly large range and quantity of information that could have a potentially commercially damaging impact or pose a threat to the identity and privacy of the individuals involved was recovered as a result of the survey.'

Two disks appear to have been formerly used by Lanarkshire NHS Trust to hold information from the Monklands and Hairmyres hospitals including patient medical records, images of x-rays, medical staff shifts and sensitive and confidential staff letters.

In Australia, one disk came from a nursing home and contained pictures of patients and their wounds.

Confidential material including network data and security logs from the German Embassy in Paris were also discovered on a disk from France.

And the trading performances and budgets of a UK-based fashion company, corporate data from a major motor manufacturing company were discovered along with details of a proposed 50 billion currency exchange through Spain involving a US-based consultant.

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Funny in a number of ways:
1) The Dept of Defense standard for wiping HDDs is fairly thorough (from memory, 7 wipe phases including overwriting the data with 1s, then with 0s and various patterns)
2) They didn't use any form of encryption, including hardware level encryption which is even available on consumer level products (ie many Gigabyte motherboards)

al those data recovery programs nevar work,. but finding top secret stuff seems to be no prob,.

Well I don't have any 2nd hand HDDs to try this on.
But, Holy spoon all that information.

Magnets 4 the WIN!

feinicks Wrote:Technically it is impossible to completely erase a hdd. You can only encrypt and thoroughly hide previous data. Once sufficiently advanced tools get developed, even this encryption is broken and new one is designed...

Well, I guess you probably shouldn't sell your Hard drives.