Old hard drives still full of confidential information
The PC World story here details how most used and discarded hard drives out there still have confidential information on them that can be easily retrieved.
This isn’t good, of course. Whether from a corporate workstation or home personal computer, you absolutely never want to let an ‘unscrubbed‘ hard drive out in the world. Lots of data you don’t want the world to see on any hard drive.
So before you dispose of any hard drive, be sure it is “scrubbed”. It’s a lot more than a simple format.
I dealt with this issue of how to scrub and clean off a hard drive in our IT blog back in May. Go here to see that post. There is also some information on disposing of computer equipment (including old hard drives) with Goodwill.
[...] The moral of the story is that the hard drive in a copier needs to be scrubbed just like the hard drive(s) in a computer you are getting rid of. I have some info on this in an older blog post here. [...]
True, the copier hard drive must be scrubbed, but the challenge in copier specific applications is that in many models, the hard drive itself contains firmware (operating code). Simply scubbing the drive renders the machine henceforth inoperable, and since most commercially used machines are leased, an expensive violation of the governing legal document has occurred.