Beware the skeletons in your reformatted hard drive

Beware the skeletons in your reformatted hard drive
Passport details, credit card information and even nude pictures were found by the programme Trash Trail on second-hand hard drives sold at Sim Lim Square.
By Desmond Ng  Posted 19 Feb 2017 16:53 Updated 19 Feb 2017 17:34
Compromising photos were among the data recovered from reformatted hard drives sold at tech stores.

SINGAPORE: Delete all personal information on computer - check. Reformat hard drive - check. Send hard drive to IT shop to clean it again - check.

After all those preventive steps, you would think that all your personal data including private pictures, bank and credit cards details would be wiped and safe from prying eyes.

Well, think again.

Channel NewsAsia documentary The Trash Trail investigated and discovered nude pictures, passport details and even blueprints from a marine engineering company on hard drives that had been reformatted and declared ‘clean’, before being re-sold to consumers.

The documentary also surveyed 1,000 Singaporeans to find out what they did to their electronic devices such as computers and tablets before discarding them - and surprisingly, about 24 per cent of them did nothing, while 37 per cent only reformatted it once.

The episode airs on Monday, Feb 20, at 8pm (SG/HK).

To find out if one’s information is truly deleted from used hard drives, Trash Trail producers bought nine used hard drives from different shops at Sim Lim Square. All the shops said the hard drives had been reformatted, with all information erased.

WATCH: The investigation (2:41)

One salesman said: “(Sometimes) the users’ computer is not able to start up, so they cannot clean it up. When we purchase it, we will use our software to clean it up, to make sure it’s empty before we sell it second-hand.”

The nine hard drives were handed over to Associate Professor Biplab Sikdar from the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore to evaluate. He specialises in how data can be safely transferred, stored and accessed.

The results were shocking. Dr Sikdar found personal information on five of the hard drives, and three had compromising personal photos on them.

They included nude pictures of someone who had presumably gone for plastic surgery. “Personally, I was very shocked to find these kind of … embarrassing and compromising pictures,” he said. “If it went to the wrong person, they might easily blackmail you.”

He also found the passport details of a person with his date of birth, medical records and another person’s bank details - all of which could be used to steal someone’s identity.

And he retrieved sensitive corporate materials from two hard-drives which once belonged to a big offshore marine engineering firm.

“They make ships. And what surprised me was that I found blueprints for the ships here.

“I would have thought that an industry, when they’re disposing of their older laptops, they would be more careful in cleaning up their stuff,” he said, adding that the information could potentially be used for fraud or corporate espionage.

While Dr Sikdar verified that all the nine hard drives had been reformatted, he was able to use software that is easily found online to extract the information.

“Think of your disk like a library… When you delete or format your disk, what happens is that the catalogue is gone. But the books are still there,” he said.

There are several ways to completely destroy your data on a hard drive, he said.

This includes degaussing the hard drive with a powerful magnet at a computer centre to wipe them clean, using software to overwrite all the info, or smashing the hard drive to bits.

CAN'T DELETE PERSONAL DATA ON E-COMMERCE SITES

But there is personal data floating around online that is even trickier or impossible to get rid of - particularly on e-commerce websites.

Many consumers typically provide their personal details such as phone numbers, credit card details and addresses when signing up at such websites. But deleting their accounts is not so simple.

Singapore online shopping site Ezbuy’s co-founder Wendy Liu said that it is not possible for consumers to completely delete their account. Deleting the app on one’s mobile device only gets rid of the app and some temporary data stored.

“But when you install it again, everything from your payment to your order history will still be there.

We have to make sure (these) are kept in our database safely for five years. It is a legal requirement,” she said.

Ms Liu assured Trash Trail that all the data is safeguarded in a database server which has limited access and is equipped with firewalls and encryption. Credit card information is usually stored with a third party.

With more organisations collecting personal data, the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) was enacted in Singapore in 2012 which regulates how one’s personal data can be collected, used, disclosed and maintained by organisations.

Christopher Chan, head of legal and government affairs at online grocer RedMart, said that under the PDPA, companies are allowed to keep their data on a consumer for legal purposes or account purposes for a certain number of years.

This is so that if there’s an investigation against the company or customers, or of financial fraud, they need to keep that information accessible so that they can report to the authorities.

He said: “So it doesn’t actually get deleted, but it gets held back with restricted access to it.

“It’s almost impossible to delete all your information online. There’s always going to be some remnant or trace of it.”

Watch more on The Trash Trail on Monday, Feb 20, 8pm (SG/HK).

- CNA/yv



- wong chee tat :)

Sitex 2016 is here!

- wong chee tat :)

Post- SITEX blues

Ok, SITEX is over.... Xmas is coming and 2014 will be over in 3 to 4 weeks. Time really flies....

I had planned to go but end up I didn't went to SITEX because I was busy preparing for oncoming stuff.

I'm looking out for new opportunities and there are some hardware stuff that I plan to upgrade:

- gigabit network switch
- new NAS storage. Enough say - I'm running out of space and I need more and more space!!!
- a new laptop. Laptop is .... d.y.i.n.g....

Hopefully, you, my dear readers can help me out a bit :)


- wong chee tat :)

Data growth remains IT's biggest challenge, Gartner says

Admins plan to expand data center capacity by the end of '11

By Lucas Mearian

November 2, 2010 06:01 AM ET

Computerworld - Data growth is the biggest data center hardware infrastructure challenge for large enterprises, according to a new survey by research firm Gartner Inc. 

According to Gartner, 47% of the respondents to a survey conducted over the summer ranked data growth in their top three challenges. With spending returning to more normal levels after a couple of down years because of the economy, 62% said they plan to expand hardware capacity at existing data centers by the end of 2011; 30% plan to build entirely new data centers.

"As the global economy begins to revive in 2010 and organizations start to shift focus to a return to growth, IT organizations will be challenged to support the various growth initiatives," said Naveen Mishra, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Last year, Mishra said, many data center managers were forced to defer infrastructure upgrades and extend technology refresh cycles. As a result, those same managers are now hampered with an aging infrastructure or, in some cases, product obsolescence.

"Vendors wishing to tap into this reopening market should propose infrastructure solutions that are high in efficiency and offer scalability as the demand grows, thus helping the companies to prepare for a return to growth," he said.

The survey took place between June and August and involved IT staffers from 1,004 large enterprises in eight countries. The data from it is available online.

In addition to concerns about data growth, 37% of those surveyed named system performance and scalability as the second biggest challenge for them in the coming year, with 36% citing network congestion and connectivity issues.

"While all the top data center hardware infrastructure challenges impact cost to some degree, data growth is particularly associated with increased costs relative to hardware, software, associated maintenance, administration and services," April Adams, research director at Gartner, said in a statement.

In an e-mail response to Computerworld Adams said data capacity on average in enterprises is growing at 40% to 60% year over year due to a number of factors, including an explosion in unstructured data, such as e-mail and documents that have to be stored due to "regulatory requirements that continue to evolve and change."

Survey respondents chose archiving and data "retirement projects" as their most popular approach to dealing with their data explosion. Sixty-two percent indicated they will invest in data retirement efforts or continue to push ongoing efforts through the end of 2011.

Adams said that while survey respondents pointed to data growth as their top challenge, they did not blame a lack of data center capacity as driving their strategic plans. Instead, they indicated business continuity and data availability as their chief reasons.

The second and third most commonly mentioned drivers for strategic change were data containment initiatives, named by 37% of respondents, and maintaining or improving user service levels and satisfaction, which was named by 36% of those surveyed.

Other projects at the top of IT staffers' lists for 2011 include: data security from internal or external hackers; storage consolidation; storage management tools rollouts; and data reduction techniques.

When it comes to technology investments, server virtualization topped the list with 67% of respondents saying they plan to spend money on that in 2011. About 56% of respondents said they also plan to invest in application consolidation. And 51% plan to spend money on blade servers.

Respondents were split when it came to IT budgets, with 44% indicating it would increase over the next year, 40% saying it would stay the same and 14% indicating it would decrease. Two-percent said they didn't know what would happen to their budgets, Adams said.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

- wong chee tat :)