| On average, 70% of re-sold hard-drives and memory | | | | pornographic matter. |
| cards contain pornographic material according to | | | | It seems that very few people are aware that simply |
| research carried out on 1,000 hard-drives over the | | | | pressing the delete button does not necessarily mean |
| course of a year by Disklabs Data Recovery and | | | | that the data is destroyed and irretrievable. This |
| Computer Forensics. | | | | research comes as a timely reminder to both |
| In addition, the company recently purchased a selection | | | | consumers and businesses that data should be |
| of storage media comprising of 100 hard-disk drives | | | | destroyed properly and not simply deleted or |
| and 50 memory cards and proceeded to process a | | | | formatted, as this is not sufficient to completely erase |
| sample batch to test what data was still retrievable | | | | stored data. |
| from them. The results were worrying as documents | | | | Disklabs have since contacted all of the owners of the |
| such as CVs and accounting spreadsheets (including | | | | hard-drives and memory cards that data was |
| names and mobile numbers) were easily accessible. | | | | retrieved from to inform them that their old media still |
| Perhaps even more worrying was the fact that many | | | | contained retrievable data. It must be stressed that all |
| previous owners had not deleted temporary Internet | | | | these storage devices have now all been properly |
| files. This means that any new, unscrupulous owner | | | | wiped by 1st Computer Traders Ltd and the devices |
| could access personal financial details, such as credit | | | | are now being used as spare parts for further data |
| card numbers and could then go on to order goods | | | | recovery tasks sent in to Disklabs Data Recovery and |
| from Internet pages by simply changing the delivery | | | | Computer Forensics Services. |
| address. Many of the sampled selection also contained | | | | |