Nearly Half the Hard Drives on EBay Hold Personal Data
A New York computer forensics firm found that 40% of the hard disk drives it recently purchased in bulk orders from eBay contained personal, private and sensitive information -- everything from corporate financial data to the Web-surfing history and downloads of a man with a foot fetish.
Kessler International conducted the survey over a six-month period, buying up disk drives from the United States and Canada ranging in size from 40GB to 300GB. The firm, which completed its survey about two weeks ago, bought a total of 100 relatively modern drives, the vast majority of them serial ATA.
"With size of the sample, I guess we were surprised with the percentage of disks that we found data on," said Michael Kessler, CEO of Kessler International. "We expected most of the drives to be wiped -- to find one or two disks with data. But 40 drives out of 100 is a lot."
