Hard Drive Leftovers
CSO Online has a report on how data on hard drives is easily recoverable these days using some basic software tools. Only 10% of drives are sanitized correctly. So if you ever sell your hard drive, be sure to clean it with a real thorough data destruction program.
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I bought and analyzed the content of more than 150 drives with the help of Abhi Shelat, another graduate student at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. We found that between one-third and one-half of the drives still had significant amounts of confidential data, even though many had been through a Format or FDisk operation. On another third, someone had deleted the document files but left the applications behind. It was a simple matter to undelete the data files and retrieve their secrets as well.
