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Cleaned' hard drives reveal secrets

14:32 16 January 03

NewScientist.com news service


Discarded and recycled computer drives can reveal financial and personal information even when apparently wiped clean, MIT researchers have found.

Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat, graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, analysed 158 second hand hard drives bought over the internet between November 2000 and August 2002. They were able to recover over 6000 credit card numbers, as well as email messages and pornographic images.

The pair wrote a program to scour the disk drives for any trace of credit card information. They found card numbers on 42 drives of the drives they bought.

One drive had previously been used in an ATM cash machine and contained 2868 different numbers, as well as account and transaction information. Another drive contained a credit card number within a cached web page.


Privacy failure

Much of the information the researchers found had been "deleted" before the disks were sold. But simply deleting a file with most computer operating systems does not remove it from the hard drive, it only removes a tag pointing to the file.

Furthermore, even re-formatting the disk does not properly remove the contents of files.

"Most techniques that people use to assure information privacy fail when data storage equipment is sold onto the secondary market," the researchers write in an article to appear in the IEEE magazine Security and Privacy. "The results of even this limited initial analysis indicate that there are no standard practices in the industry [for sanitizing disks]."