Are you sure you wiped your hard drive properly?

Are you sure you wiped your hard drive properly?

Almost 60% of second-hand hard drives hold leftover data from previous owners, a study shows



Have you ever seen a hacker movie? When the other shoe drops, you can see the black hat scrambling for their computer, tearing out their hard drives and trying to erase them. They may even run neodymium magnets over them and then finish the job by driving an electric drill directly through the platters of the drives. Alternatively, they just smash it with a hammer and hope for the best.


Rest assured, you really do not have to go about smashing your hard drives left and right, but you should always ensure the security and privacy of your data under all circumstances – a point made even clearer by a recent study.


Commissioned by Comparitech and conducted by the University of Hertfordshire, the study sought to find out how thorough we are when it comes to wiping our hard drives before we sell them. Turns out, many of us are not very thorough. Or at all.


The researchers performed a series of tests on a sample of 200 second-hand hard drives that had been bought off online marketplaces and various merchants. They found that almost 60% of these hard drives still contained some information stored on them by the former owners.


The leftover information included sensitive data that could be exploited by bad actors. The data ranged from official documents such as scans of passports and driver licenses, through bank statements and tax documents to visa applications and even photos of an intimate nature. The list of documents uncovered on these hard drives is much more varied, but this is just to illustrate how mu ..

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