Many Used Exhausting Drives Offered on eBay Nonetheless Include Leftover Information

Should you plan on reselling a PC onerous drive, ensure you completely delete every little thing inside. A brand new research from information elimination firm Blannco reveals that many secondhand storage drives offered on eBay nonetheless comprise information from the earlier proprietor, together with personally identifiable info (PII).

Blannco bought 159 SSD and HDD storage drives on eBay, and had them analyzed to see if any information might be recovered. The used drives have been bought within the US, UK, Germany, and Finland and lined a variety of manufacturers akin to Samsung, Dell, and Seagate.

Sadly, not all of the drives have been completely wiped. Sixty-six of them, or 42 %, nonetheless retained a few of the information onboard. Of these, 25 drives nonetheless held PII, akin to photographs, start certificates, names, and e mail addresses.

“This implies greater than 15 % of the drives examined contained delicate info that might be harmful within the palms of id thieves or hackers,” Blancco stated within the report. “In different phrases, for each 20 drives, a minimum of three had PII.”

One drive, specifically, got here from a software program developer who had been granted authorities safety clearance. The drive contained his household’s start certificates, scanned copies of their passports, and monetary data. One other drive contained hundreds of photographs from a lady in Denmark, alongside along with her identify and buddies’ names.

“Each vendor we bought drives from insisted that correct information sanitization strategies had been carried out in order that no information was left behind,” Blancco stated. “This demonstrates that sellers are trying to completely wipe information. Nevertheless, many are failing to make use of a completely efficient resolution.”

In keeping with Blancco, resellers will try and wipe storage drives just by “formatting” them, believing the method will erase all the information inside. However usually, this course of solely clears the index to succeed in the information on board the storage drive, and doesn’t erase the information itself. One other downside is that the formatting course of would not affirm to the proprietor whether or not the information is actually gone.

This research echoes what Blannco present in 2016 when it carried out the same evaluation of 200 secondhand onerous drives purchased on eBay and Craigslist. In that research, 67 % of the onerous drives contained personally identifiable info.

To correctly clear a tough drive, Blancco recommends you utilize its personal information erasure merchandise. PCMag additionally has a information on different onerous drive clearing instruments you need to use.