Hard Drives Exposed

By Tom Spring
PC World Magazine
May 2003

It's a chilly March Saturday at the Pit, a concrete holding pen for abandoned computer parts and used hard drives at the Needham, Massachusetts, town dump. Nearby, three locals wait patiently in their idling cars.

An SUV pulls up. Driver James Curtin grabs an old PC from the back and puts it into the Pit alongside other used hard drives, CRT monitors, and old computer chassis. Slowly the other men exit their cars and walk toward the discarded computer--one with a screwdriver in hand.

For these PC scavengers, the Pit is a gold mine for used hard drives, memory chips, processors, and other components that they use to build PCs on the cheap. But they also routinely find something else: business and personal data that prior owners have left on discarded used hard drives.

• "[On] almost every hard drive I pull, I'll find a tax return or a resume," says David Burns, who describes himself as a Needham regular.

Properly sanitizing a used hard drive before giving away or reselling a computer requires only a small investment of time and an inexpensive disk-erasing tool. But many people don't even do minimal cleanup.

Used Hard Drives--Data Galore

An examination of ten used hard drives we bought or salvaged in the Boston area disclosed a wealth of sensitive data. On all but one of them, we found data, including confidential business, medical, and legal records; Social Security, credit card, and bank account numbers; e-mail; and even pornography.

Most of the information was easy pickings--even on four used hard drives whose previous owners had attempted to erase data, either by deleting files and emptying the recycle bin or by reformatting the disk. Those measures simply conceal the data from the operating system. Not surprisingly, the equipment's former owners were shocked to learn that strangers had accessed their information.

• "I went through my PC and thought I had thoroughly deleted everything," Curtin said of his old TriGem 486.

The accountant said that his nephew, who worked at a computer store, had removed the used hard drive while upgrading his old computer several months earlier. The accountant said that he never thought to ask his nephew what had become of the hard drive.

Similarly, a Salvation Army store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sold us a PC that had once belonged to an attorney; it still contained bank account numbers, an active America Online account (and a stored password), and draft legal documents on its hard drive.

• "I most certainly never expected my personal information would ever be more than just that--personal," said the attorney.

Our samples confirmed the findings of a study conducted earlier this year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two graduate students, Simson Garfinkel (who is also a prolific technology writer) and Abhi Shelat, bought 158 used hard drives on EBay and from online shops.

Of 129 drives that worked, 69 had recoverable files and 49 contained personal information, including 3,700 credit card numbers, medical data, and pornography. Only 12 of the usable drives had been properly purged.

"This is a serious problem," Shelat says. Businesses become vulnerable when they unwittingly share sensitive information. And individuals leave themselves open to identity theft, a potentially ruinous crime that the Federal Trade Commission received nearly 162,000 complaints about in 2002--almost double the 2001 total.

Resurrected Used Hard Drives

Tossing your used hard drives out with the trash is no guarantee that it--and your data--will find a quiet resting place in a landfill. And scavengers like those at the Needham Pit are only part of the picture. As more towns and cities ban PCs from their landfills, businesses are cashing in.

Computer Salvage of New England collects old PCs and cannibalizes them for parts that it then sells. Similarly, the city of Cambridge pays a recycling company called Onyx Environmental Services to haul off PCs left for curbside pickup. Onyx salvages the parts and resells them.

Research firm Gartner Dataquest reports that businesses and individuals took about 150,000 used hard drives out of service in 2002. Meanwhile, reported incidents of data security compromised by improper disposal of unwanted PCs have increased exponentially, says Gartner research director Frances O'Brien.

• "Companies don't think twice about giving hard drives a simple reformat and handing the PCs out to employees, charities, or whoever else can save them a buck on disposal costs," O'Brien says.

Even when people reformat the used hard drive, a motivated sleuth can retrieve data using tools such as Norton SystemWorks' Disk Editor or the free Disk Investigator.

We did this on a drive purchased at the Super Computer Sale (a traveling computer fair), and uncovered research, e-mail messages, and a log of Web sites visited by employees at Fairfax Financial Holdings of Ontario, Canada.

• "It shouldn't have happened," said Brad Martin, Fairfax's vice president of investor relations. "We are going to make sure that something like this never happens again."

Being able to recover deleted data can be useful: Ask anyone who's ever accidentally trashed a file. Hard drive data can help nail criminals, says Tom Galligan, owner of Electronic Evidence Recovery of Tiverton, Rhode Island.

But honest PC users have a legitimate interest in destroying data when they discard an old PC. Curtin wishes he had been more careful with his old drive. "I'll never make that mistake twice," he says.

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E-Waste Not

By Bryan Walsh
Even though holiday sales were down at least 2% from 2007, millions of Americans awoke Christmas morning to new computers, TVs and iPhones. (I didn't, but thanks for the pens, Mom.) Many of those gifts were replacements or upgrades, which prompts the question, What should you do with your old cell phone and other electronic equipment?

If you're like some 80% of Americans, you'll simply toss your obsolete gizmos into the trash. After all, that Jurassic 15-in. (38 cm) computer monitor doesn't look as though it's packing up to 7 lb. (3 kg) of lead. Every day Americans throw out more than 350,000 cell phones and 130,000 computers, making electronic waste the fastest-growing part of the U.S. garbage stream. Improperly disposed of, the lead, mercury and other toxic materials inside e-waste can leak from landfills. (See pictures of China's electronic waste village.)

If you're part of the 20% trying to do the right thing by recycling your e-waste, there's something else to worry about. Old phones and computers can be dismantled to get at the useful metals inside, but doing so safely is time-consuming. Thus, many electronics recyclers ship American e-waste abroad, where it is stripped and burned with little concern for environmental or human health. And authorities rarely stop the export of potentially hazardous e-waste. The U.S. is the only industrialized country that refused to ratify the 19-year-old Basel Convention, an international treaty designed to regulate the export of hazardous waste to developing nations. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) oversees the export of only one type of e-waste--cathode-ray tubes in old TVs and monitors--and a report last August by the Government Accountability Office dismissed the EPA's enforcement as "lacking."

The same report included a sting investigation that found that 43 U.S. recycling firms were willing to ship broken monitors with cathode-ray tubes to buyers in foreign countries without getting the required permission from the EPA and the receiving nations. Yet some of these companies had been trumpeting their exemplary environmental principles to the public. "At least three of them held Earth Day 2008 electronics-recycling events," the report notes.

A lot of exported e-waste ends up in Guiyu, China, a recycling hub where peasants heat circuit boards over coal fires to recover lead, while others use acid to burn off bits of gold. According to reports from nearby Shantou University, Guiyu has the highest level of cancer-causing dioxins in the world and elevated rates of miscarriages. "You see women sitting by the fireplace burning laptop adapters, with rivers of ash pouring out of houses," says Jim Puckett, founder of Basel Action Network (BAN), an e-waste watchdog. "We're dumping on the rest of the world." Puckett and other environmentalists are pushing for a full ban on e-waste exports. They're hopeful that the new Administration will prove receptive; as a Senator, President-elect Barack Obama co-sponsored a bill that in 2008 became a law barring the export of mercury.

In the meantime, green groups are pressuring electronics manufacturers to take responsibility for the afterlife of their products. The strategy is working. By reducing toxic metals like mercury and using fewer small pieces of aluminum and glass, companies like Apple now design their laptops to be more easily recycled. Sony has pledged to work only with recyclers that pledge not to export e-waste. And Dell, which since 2004 has offered free recycling for its products (customers arrange shipping online), recently announced an in-store recycling program with Staples. To confirm that its recyclers are really recycling, Dell uses environmental-audit firms to check up on its partners.

So how do you ensure that your old phone doesn't end up poisoning a kid in China? If it's still working and in good condition, you can sell it to Greenphone.com which markets such phones to poor customers overseas. If it's broken, don't put it in the garbage with the wrapping paper and the fruitcake. Instead, find out if your retailer or manufacturer offers free recycling. If not, BAN has put together a list of "e-stewards," U.S. recyclers the group has accredited; check them out at ban.org

But one tiny activist group can't stop the mountain of e-waste Americans are producing, a mountain that will only grow when cable companies stop broadcasting analog signals on Feb. 17 and render obsolete the millions of rabbit ears used on old TV sets. Some TV manufacturers, like Sony, are offering free take-back programs, but if you really want to be e-green, try this: get a coupon from Uncle Sam for a discounted digital converter, and don't upgrade your old TV (or phone or computer) for a little while longer. It may not be in the generous holiday spirit, but it certainly fits the new recessionary one.

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870485,00.html

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