Discarded hard drives yield personal data

Two MIT students have found that 74% of discarded or second-hand hard drives still contain recoverable data based on an analysis of 158 disk drives bought on eBay, at computer stores, salvage companies, and swap meets, reports Infoworld. A third of the drives that had been reformatted still contained recoverable data. "Financial log files on one drive yielded what appeared to be 2,868 credit card numbers in addition to bank account numbers, dates of transactions and account balances. The students believe that the drive came from an automatic teller machine in Illinois and that no effort was made to remove any of the financial information on the drive prior to resale." AP covers the same story and has a photograph.