How would you feel if your personal data was sold, (along with thousands of others) on eBay, for around 64 dollars? When we say personal data, we are talking about names, addresses, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, phone numbers, mothers’ maiden names, scans of signatures, and more. It’s very personal information that could easily be used to steal an identity and doesn’t belong in the hands of just anybody.
Recently, a man by the name of Andrew Chapman purchased a used computer on eBay for around 64 U.S. dollars. To his surprise, it came with more than he expected. Along with the computer came a hard drive loaded with the personal data of thousands and thousands of people. The data he received belonged to those with American Express, Natawest, and Royal Bank of Scotland accounts.
Luckily Chapman was an honest guy and reported his find, but what about the person who sold the computer? Apparently the computer was sold by a former employee of an archiving firm called Graphic Data. Graphic Data was questioned on the situation and said, “Certain pieces of IT equipment has been moved from a secure area. We are seeking to recover this equipment, which apparently contained customer data. We take customer privacy and data security very seriously.” Talk about a security breach!
This just goes to show that you never really know what you’re going to end-up with when you buy something on eBay.
Source: The Register
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Last year I bought an 80GB HD from very well known computer company where I live, I think it was about £5 / $10. I took it home being told it had been reformatted and I would need to install an OS on it. That was no problem for me, I switched the pc on forgetting to put the Ubuntu disk in the CD-ROM drive and to my surprise it booted up to Windows ME. So I when looking around the OS thinking it was very odd. Loaded “My Documents” and there was 100’s of documents ranging from word documents containing her old bank details and her new card/bank details sent to her by her bank,(only few months old) it seems she had just change banks & cards few months before sending this HD to them. Other files were home photos/videos, Excel files showing her expenditure and income for the last 5 years. The horrors continued I connected it to the internet to see if the network card worked still and I loaded up Outlook and it started downloading new e-mails some of the e-mails it downloaded where only few hours old sent to her that day. With few e-mails telling the previous owner there new contact details (address, e-mail, telephone) and to get in contact with them, after that I reformatted the HD and put XP on it
It seems that since the PC was sold for only $64 and the eBay listing did not mention people’s personal information for sale, I would say this is an honest mistake. I work for the State of North Carolina and when we retire old equipment, we run kill disk on it to completely wipe the hard drive. However, it makes me wonder how many PCs this does not happen to.
Before getting rid of computers or HDs, I use one of the wiping tools on UBCD. There are presets that supposedly meet DoD and other government specifications, or you can come up with your own settings. It’s not a fast process by any means — you’ll want to have a good 6-8 hours depending on the drive size and method of wiping.
[ultimatebootcd.com]
Fine with me as long as they give me a piece of that pie.
I will have to check this out if I ever decide to sell a hard drive. Thanks!
From the sounds of it, it was a former employee who took the computer and sold it. I don’t know if it was an honest mistake, or a situation where they took something they weren’t supposed to, which is why they are now a “former” employee.