January 16, 2003
So you've trashed your computer...
You took that broken down 486 that's been in the basement and tossed it out on garbage day. Maybe you were vigilant and formatted the hard drive before kicking it to the curb. But that doesn't mean your personal data is gone. It could very well be in the hands of unscrupulous data scavengers.
There are programs that specialize in recovering data from broken and reformatted hard drives. In about three seconds I found about 31,500 matches for data recovery programs and specialists on Google. Maybe the guy who scavenges your computer out of the garbage pile will make use of one. Think you have nothing to hide?
Do you use financial software? Then your account information for every bill that you track and pay is on your hard drive.
Do you send email? Then every email you have saved to your computer is available to Morty who just pulled your computer from a Dumpster. Including the steamy ones you sent in 1996 to that online guy who turned out to be a creep.
Do you keep an electronic address book? All of you contacts are now in someone else's hands.
Do you surf the Web? Your history files, cookies and Internet passwords may now belong to someone else.
The real threat is when businesses sell or auction off old equipment. It disturbs me to think that Bob's Web Site O'Fun may have compromised the security of my personal data by selling sloppily-erased hard drives at auction.
In most operating systems, deleting a file merely marks that area of the disk as available without erasing a thing. And reformatting a hard drive will not permanently erase the data on it. See one of the 31,500 sites on Google to learn how easy it is to recover data from a formatted hard drive.
To combat data theft from old hard drives, computer users can run programs like Autoclave to write meaningless data over all areas of the hard drive. Depending on the number of passes Autoclave makes of your hard drive, you can end up with data so completely gone that even the NSA can't get it back. Useful for hiding all those games of Global Thermonuclear War you've been dialing into the WOPR to play...
Autoclave is meant for systems running Linux, but there are instructions for using Autoclave with a Windows-based OS available as well.