Month: September 2018

In the news today…
Canadian gadget retailer NCIX old computer equipment turned up on the second-hand market without ever being wiped, exposing the personal data of approximately 260,000 people.

We hear all the time of hackers breaking into computer networks to steal customer data. And companies spend billions worldwide to secure these networks. But it is often underreported that there is a huge security hole that people and companies almost never address, what happens to the data that’s on old systems?

Most people and many companies just dump their old systems, without doing anything to secure the data they hold. Which leaves this data ripe for the taking from the first dumpster diver that comes along. Also many people and companies sell their used computers on craigslist, ebay and other popular websites without addressing the issue of what happens to the data that was stored on these systems.

There is a growing trend of criminals that search for these systems as getting the login information for one bank account, credit card or your social security number could make them tens of thousands of dollars and they can get these systems for free (dumpster diving) or at very low cost (Craigslist / Ebay / Thrift store.)

While many people will spend days or even weeks picking their new computer, the sad thing is most don’t even spend 5 minutes planing what they will do with their old system.

The urban myth that you can just format a drive and be safe is untrue. As there are dozens of free utility programs on the Internet that will let somebody recover data from a recently formatted hard drive.

To be totally safe, old computer hard drives must be wiped with professional software that both encrypts the data that was stored on these drives and then overwrites this data with random data, to prevent others from retrieving what was on the old system.

As this is an operation most will not know how to do and won’t have the experience to verify was completed successfully, RenoGeek recommends that you hire a professional for this very last task your old computer must have done, before retiring it.

Otherwise you may have to deal with the consequences, sometimes years later, of your personal or customers data being released for the whole world to exploit.