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Serious Formatted Hard Drives Not Formatted After All! Nudes Found!!!

JohnTan

Alfrescian (InfP)
Generous Asset
[video=youtube;UVL2bH6wedo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVL2bH6wedo[/video]

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SINGAPORE: Delete all personal information on computer - check. Reformat hard drive - check. Send hard drive to IT shop to clean it again - check.

After all those preventive steps, you would think that all your personal data including private pictures, bank and credit cards details would be wiped and safe from prying eyes.

Well, think again.

Channel NewsAsia documentary The Trash Trail investigated and discovered nude pictures, passport details and even blueprints from a marine engineering company on hard drives that had been reformatted and declared ‘clean’, before being re-sold to consumers.

The documentary also surveyed 1,000 Singaporeans to find out what they did to their electronic devices such as computers and tablets before discarding them - and surprisingly, about 24 per cent of them did nothing, while 37 per cent only reformatted it once.

The episode airs on Monday, Feb 20, at 8pm (SG/HK).

To find out if one’s information is truly deleted from used hard drives, Trash Trail producers bought nine used hard drives from different shops at Sim Lim Square. All the shops said the hard drives had been reformatted, with all information erased.

One salesman said: “(Sometimes) the users’ computer is not able to start up, so they cannot clean it up. When we purchase it, we will use our software to clean it up, to make sure it’s empty before we sell it second-hand.”

The nine hard drives were handed over to Associate Professor Biplab Sikdar from the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore to evaluate. He specialises in how data can be safely transferred, stored and accessed.

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The results were shocking. Dr Sikdar found personal information on five of the hard drives, and three had compromising personal photos on them.

They included nude pictures of someone who had presumably gone for plastic surgery. “Personally, I was very shocked to find these kind of … embarrassing and compromising pictures,” he said. “If it went to the wrong person, they might easily blackmail you.”

He also found the passport details of a person with his date of birth, medical records and another person’s bank details - all of which could be used to steal someone’s identity.

And he retrieved sensitive corporate materials from two hard-drives which once belonged to a big offshore marine engineering firm.

“They make ships. And what surprised me was that I found blueprints for the ships here.

“I would have thought that an industry, when they’re disposing of their older laptops, they would be more careful in cleaning up their stuff,” he said, adding that the information could potentially be used for fraud or corporate espionage.

While Dr Sikdar verified that all the nine hard drives had been reformatted, he was able to use software that is easily found online to extract the information.

“Think of your disk like a library… When you delete or format your disk, what happens is that the catalogue is gone. But the books are still there,” he said.

There are several ways to completely destroy your data on a hard drive, he said.

This includes degaussing the hard drive with a powerful magnet at a computer centre to wipe them clean, using software to overwrite all the info, or smashing the hard drive to bits.


http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news...reformatted-hard-drive/3531674.html?cid=FBcna
 

cuckoldoolittle

Alfrescian
Loyal
Zeroing out hard drive.

Leave No Trace: How to Completely Erase Your Hard Drives, SSDs and Thumb Drives



Highly security-conscious users have long recommended using a utility to write zeros in the unused areas of your hard drive,
overwriting any scraps and fragments of old files there so that they can’t be easily recovered by snoops.
Sometimes, the tools for doing this write multiple patterns of numbers multiple times, making recovery of the
overwritten old data extremely difficult— in fact, all but impossible, except through truly extraordinary and expensive means.

If you ever want to totally get rid all data on a hard drive, the best thing to do is zero-write it.
As opposed to formatting, which only erases links to files (which, practically removes everything)
but leaves the actual data, zero-writing actually sets the value of each sector of your hard drive to 0.

This insures the data is removed as everything is totally overwritten.

Zero-writing a hard drive is always a good idea if you are getting rid of an old hard drive as you know
what might happen to it. In order to zero-write a drive, you can download the hard drive tools from your
hard drive manufacturer’s website, or download a copy of the
Ultimate Boot CD as it contains the tools for virtually all manufacturers.
 
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krafty

Alfrescian (Inf)
Asset
I am going down to SLS tomorrow to buy up as many second-hand 'formatted' hard disks tomorrow. Who knows what treasures I may find!

please get one for me, i may hit a jackpot, who knows if the hard disk may belong to the small time actress of mediacock.:biggrin:
 

apogee

Alfrescian
Loyal
Can any good brothers or sisters here tell me which software I can buy to write zeros. I know in the old days Norton Utilities could do it. But do seem to find an software now.
What I have been doing is to low format the hard disk.
 

cuckoldoolittle

Alfrescian
Loyal
Correct me if I'm wrong, isn't zero filling the same as low level formatting? :o:o:o

Formatting a disk for use by an operating system and its applications typically involves three different processes.


  1. Low-level formatting aka zeroing (i.e., closest to the hardware) marks the surfaces of the disks with markers indicating the start of a recording block (typically today called sector markers) and other information like block CRC to be used later, in normal operations, by the disk controller to read or write data. This is intended to be the permanent foundation of the disk, and is often completed at the factory.
  2. Partitioning divides a disk into one or more regions, writing data structures to the disk to indicate the beginning and end of the regions. This level of formatting often includes checking for defective tracks or defective sectors.
  3. High-level formatting creates the file system format within a disk partition or a logical volume. This formatting includes the data structures used by the OS to identify the logical drive or partition's contents. This may occur during operating system installation, or when adding a new disk. Disk and distributed file system may specify an optional boot block, and/or various volume and directory information for the operating system.
 

cuckoldoolittle

Alfrescian
Loyal
But why waste it, just throw in some creativity and recycle the old faithful into something useful.

harddrive_parts.jpg

Soap dish
dd3.jpg


grinder
dd2.jpg


Mars Explorer
dd6.jpeg


Harley
dd4.jpeg


Megatron
dd5.jpeg


Starship USS Enterprise
iu

Formula One
iu



Eye Candy
iu
 

virus

Alfrescian
Loyal
Can any good brothers or sisters here tell me which software I can buy to write zeros. I know in the old days Norton Utilities could do it. But do seem to find an software now.
What I have been doing is to low format the hard disk.

i prefer tuneup utilities to shred the files.
 

krafty

Alfrescian (Inf)
Asset
using software to low level format your hard disk is not fool proof, the best is still physically damage it so there is no alternative to recover it. my 2 cents.
 
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