Sorry for the long title. Here's the link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1178239/Computer-hard-drive-sold-eBay-details-secret-U-S-missile-defence-system.html
Before I dive into the article itself, I have to ask: Just who is wiping these hard drives, if anybody? Elmer Fudd?
From the article: " The disk also contained security policies, blueprints of facilities and personal information on employees including social security numbers, belonging to technology company Lockheed Martin - who designed and built the system. "
OK...this should really make you wonder. But if it's any consolation, disks from the UK, France, and Germany were found to have other sensitive information. Information was found from a nursing home which, according to the article, included "...pictures of patients and their wounds."
Also, according to the article, 34 per cent of the disks had " 'information of either personal data that could be identified to an individual or commercial data identifying a company or organisation.' "
I guess that would be another "duh" moment?? Just who is wiping these things, if anybody?
By wiping, I don't mean deleting, I mean wiping such as is done by a low-level format. Deleting typically just deletes the first few bytes of the file. This "erases" the file from the disk's FAT (File Allocation Table). The file (including whatever information was included) is still there, it's just that the hard drive thinks it's gone.
When you do a disk wipe, you overwrite every bit on the drive and rewrite them with either gibberish or 1's and 0's. That includes the FAT and the partition table!
This really isn't rocket science, folks. It really isn't. There are any number of programs out there (some of them are free!) that will securely overwrite the disk. This is not rocket science.
Yes, it takes time to securely overwrite a disk. If you do it correctly, it could take several hours to several days. But it's worth the effort.
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