Oops, It's Back Again and the Bad Guys Have It!

Just when you thought that the hard drive was clean, it’s suddenly becomes the case of the mysteriously reappearing data. You wouldn’t leave the keys in your unlocked car, your American Express card on a table in the reception area or payroll and personnel records lying around in public areas, would you? So why would you give away a computer or just send it to surplus or charity without properly cleaning the hard drive?

If you are like most people reading this article, you are well aware of identity theft and what could happen if confidential corporate information got into the wrong hands. But you are probably thinking to yourself, “what do I have to worry about? I cleaned off all of those old emails, passwords, files, etc”. And maybe you even reformatted the hard drive(s) to be absolutely sure. Surprise, some or all of that personal and or company information may still be there, hidden in the dark deep recesses of the digital world. You did see that old classic sci-fi movie TRON didn’t you?

Despite all the hoopla, the fact remains that personal computers were never really designed with security in mind. Potentially any and all information that ever existed was added, edited or materialized on a hard drive, still exists and can be recovered by someone with the proper tools and talent.

The bad guys keep getting more sophisticated and are increasingly looking for surplus and recycled PCs as a source of private and proprietary information. In particular, they are looking for information that can be used to steal an individual’s identity or perhaps confidential corporate information which can be sold to other dubious businesses or people. And one of the worst case scenarios, your information can be used to blackmail a business or individual.

Not nice, but it is a reality. Surplus technology that is donated is often auctioned off to the public and who knows who might get their mitts on that information that you so carefully ensured didn’t exist anymore. Or what about that co-worker, employee or friend that you passed your old equipment down to, they’re 100% trustworthy, aren’t they?

So what to do? Short of taking a blow torch or sledge hammer to your hard drive, which unfortunately is not quite effective but very fun, the only really effective thing you can do is to purchase disk scrubbing software.

Deleting files, reformatting and yes even taking a blow torch to the hard drive does essentially nothing from a security standpoint. The data remains behind even after reformatting. And you’ve surely seen those ads for data recovery from computers exposed to fires and floods.

Reformatting will keep most people out of your old files. But specialized software exists to reclaim files even after reformatting. If you do not know who will get the computer, or you do know and you don't fully trust them, scrubbing is the answer.

What disk scrubbing does is repeatedly write data to the hard drive(s), typically first with a random numeric character, then overwrites that data with a random alphanumeric character often followed by random symbols. This process is repeated until nothing but gibberish remains on the computer. The whole drive can be scrubbed or you can just leave the operating system and selected files on the hard disk, if you choose, as these programs can be set to overwrite only the unoccupied areas. Keep in mind however that this process is irreversible and can be quite slow so you might want to run it overnight.

There are a whole slew of products available to the do-it-yourselfer such as OnTrack's DataEraser, Norton’s Wipe Info, White Canyon’s WipeDrive Pro and others. Or better yet, have an IT professional do it for you – better safe than sorry. Besides you have better things to do don’t you?

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