You just never know what you’re going to get when buying wares off eBay. You could be purchasing a box of rocks or a used government hard drive that still has security polices, blueprints of facilities, and government employee’s social security numbers. You just never know, eh?
Similar data was recently found on drives that where scrutinized for sensitive data purchased by three universities. Of the 300 used disks purchased in this test, 34% had personal, commercial, and government info on them. One drive even had the test launch procedures of Lockheed Martin’s THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) ground to air missile defense system used to shoot down Scud missiles in Iraq. (pictured)
Some of these drives had a basic format performed, but come on, if a drive has government military secrets on it, a power drill seems like the appropriate tool to wipe the data. Not only that, the hard drive should probably not be sold on the used market being eBay, Craigslist, or a fleamarket. Let this be a lesson to us all. If you have, or had, data stored on a hard drive that big brother or a terrorist would find interesting, don’t sell your hard drive.
These hard disks could have been cleaned up very easily using Permanent File Delete
I think the official procedure for government hard drives is degauss -> shred -> burn filings -> lock ashes in a box. I’m not even kidding. But that might just be for the drives from classified computers (because there are computers that are cleared to handle classified information, and those that are not (most are not).
But also, the hard drive could have very well come from a contractor’s computer instead of a government computer, since they would have to review and agree to any test plan (and they often write the test plans themselves).
I knew of a contract once that was simply requiring a 7 or 14 format process.. I think this was DOD drives going out for resale. I think I also heard DOD spec was only 4 wipes.. but it’s been a couple of years since the convo..
Or……maybe the government is deliberately planting false information to throw off our enemies, track spies , gather intelligence on rogue nations, etc.
Whoops- my bad- government and intelligence in the same sentence. ***Waves and nods to the CIA, FBI and NSA that’s watching him right now…***
That’s good that they found those secrets. If America is so great and free then there shouldn’t be any secrets. correct
That’s good that they found those secrets. Cause if America is so great and free like we all say then there shouldn’t be any secrets. Everybody should know that George W. Bush lied to the congress only to go to war with Iraq. And everybody should be able to know where our money is going too common to missiles were dead were already dead there’s no need to waist money on stupid shit like that.