Security, et al

I did a webinar a while back with Paul Henry on “What One Digital Forensics Expert Found On Hundreds of Hard Drives, iPhones and Android Devices” which was sponsored by Blancco Technology Group who makes really cool data erasure software for the enterprise.

Blancco has released a whitepaper, The Leftovers: A Data Recovery Study, based on the same work that Paul did. To demonstrate just how easy, common and dangerous it is when data is improperly removed before used electronics are resold, Blancco Technology Group purchased a total of 200 used hard disk drives and solid state drives from eBay and Craigslist in the first quarter of 2016.

Here are the top findings from their study:

• 67 percent of the used hard disk drives and solid state drives hold personally identifiable information and 11 percent contain sensitive corporate data.
• Upon analyzing the 200 used drives, company emails were recovered on 9 percent of the drives, followed by spreadsheets containing sales projections and product inventories (5 percent) and CRM records (1 percent).
• 36 percent of the used HDDs/SSDs containing residual data had data improperly deleted from them by simply dragging files to the ‘Recycle Bin’ or using the basic delete button.

Check out the paper at  http://info.blancco.com/en-rs-leftovers-a-data-recovery-study?utm_source=ultimatewindowssecurity&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=UWS