'Destroyed' Hard Drive Found At Flea Market

Billosaur writes "From Yahoo News comes this tidbit about a couple who got a very shocking phone call. Henry and Roma Gerbus received a phone call from a man named Ed claiming he had purchased their old hard drive at a flea market. They had previously taken their computer to Best Buy to have the hard drive replaced and were told that the store would destroy it. Now it has turned up at a flea market, still containing their personal information, such as bank account numbers and Social Security numbers. The Gerbus' are a little perplexed and are very worried about identity theft."

Scandalous!

Memo to store managers throughout the country: "Rotate a new batch of minimum-wage slaves into all positions, which demand technical skills and adherence to moral and ethical code, post haste!"

Gad! Whatever could motivate people who are compensated so well to scrap computers and sell parts at a flea market? I shall have to dwell further upon this great paradox this weekend at my summer cottage in the Hamptons.

Re:Scandalous!

Its quite easy.

Erasing the data would have been work.
Setting it up again to be able to sell it as a "working computer" would have been more work.

Just taking it and selling it as is: minimum work.

Re:Scandalous!

What could motivate them to sell it is one thiing, but what motivated them to sell it with the data on is surely harder to explain.

You're assuming Best Buy sells off this scrap. In reality they should be turning it over to a disposal company (which, in theory, could sell the parts at flea market if not the most upstanding of ethical standards are adhered to.) But as the drive should have had Holes Drilled In it smells more like the monkey in charge of that job at BB chose not to, which strongly suggests it was they who pawned the drive, not corporate masters.

Of course in a moment of doubt, always lean towards the simplest answer: the guy who did it was a really stupid mofo.

Stupid, certainly. Unethical, most definitely. He or she should be sacked and then turned over to authorities for prosecution on theft, sale of stolen property, etc.

Re:Scandalous!

As a public service, links to three excellent, free, software based HDD wiping utilities. The first is even open source ...

Darik's Boot and Nuke [sourceforge.net]
Active Kill Disk [killdisk.com]
PC Inspector [pcinspector.de]

There should never be an excuse for selling or transfering ownership of a hard drive with pre-existing data when there are fast, free, and convienient utilities that can effectively remove all data without damaging HDD functionality. Physical destruction is of course, the most secure method of permanently wiping data, but for most folks good software based data destruction should be more than sufficient.

Obligatory disclaimer: I am in no way associated with any of the above products except as a satisfied user.

Re:In situations like that, there is no substitute

I feel a Darwin Award coming up.

Re:SSN?

Someone who has electronic account statements from their bank and/or brokerage.

Re:SSN?

I had, but luckily it got mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw'd.

Re:SSN?

Ahhhh now this is by far the dumbest comment I have heard. Is he joking? Or does he not know that personal computers as well as business computers are used to assist users in managing things like oh ... taxes, perform banking, store financial records, act as an archive for scanned documents, so on and so forth.

Or ... does this person think computers are used purely for playing games and watching a blue and red bar move as you defrag a hard drive? Or maybe people play games with folders to see how straight they can make the icons?

In my world, computers are used for far more than entertainment, toys and gimmicks. It is a way for people to manage their day to day lives, simplify complex tasks or just act as a way to get away from a paper based society. Well, they can play games just as easy too, but you get the point.

Hard drives are often a wealth of private information and it is up to the person disposing of it to ensure that it cannot be read.

And to the people getting ready to reply with "well that is the problem with computers" or "never keep personal information on a HD". It is akin to countless people (yes there are many) throwing documents like credit card bills or ANY paper information with private information in the trash. Ultimately it is up to the person to ensure he/she SHREDS the documents FIRST before trashing. This is no different than electronic media.

As if though it matters...

Anyone that is taking a PC to Best Buy for a HDD replacement is probably sending money to Prince Abul Smith of Nigeria anyways.

Re:Must've been a mistake

> Someone got serviced by the wrong Geek Squad guy

...and we've got the disgusting pictures to prove it, right here on this hard drive we found at a flea market!

Destroy it yourself

If the information on the hard drive was so sensitive, why didn't the couple destroy it themselves? Even if Best Buy did destroy it, an employee would have had access to it anyway before its destruction. That's a security risk either way.

Re:Destroy it yourself

If the information on the hard drive was so sensitive, why didn't the couple destroy it themselves? Even if Best Buy did destroy it, an employee would have had access to it anyway before its destruction. That's a security risk either way.

It's called: "Misplaced Trust in Corporate America"

Why, just look at these words which follow, meant to calm and sooth the worried customer:

"Our company values and places the utmost importance on maintaining the privacy of our customers. We will fully investigate these allegations."

They no doubt came from some tome of boilerplate Corporate Communications and Public Relations.

The real translation behind the scenes is doubtless anything less than a fast call to the law firm Best Buy retains to see how much they could be sued for and another call to the PR department to get the above phrase looked up in the Table of Contents and issued to media outlets. Meanwhile in the board room the executives are probably all bent over, like a circular conga-line holding covers over the arses of those in front of them.

Proper Planning

Most likely, but then the "cats out of the bag","the horse has left the barn". What should have been done wasn't. Now weither that was due to corporate neglect, or employee neglect isn't known.

Here's the problem: A low paid employee, rather than drill holes in a drive, took it home and sold it off at a flea market. It's a small object of possibly (depending upon contents) very great value.

Where are the controls to prevent such action taking place? Consider the bank teller -- not likely a very highly paid employee, yet thousands of dollars in coin and currency pass through their hands every day. Banks have worked out procedures to ensure their employees remain honest, whether balancing their drawers, surveillance cameras, or limiting how much they may hold in at their station at any given time (i.e. if Bill Gates walks in with a suitcase full of money, the teller must turn the large deposit over to a bank officer.)

Clearly as things of great risk assume different (smaller) dimensions people in charge have not adapted their procedures. This is a failure of Best Buy at the corporate level, not just some store. They need these items to be handled with full accountability.

Re:Destroy it yourself

Perhaps because they didn't know what a "hard drive" was, save for the box that came with their computer (the screen).

Re:Destroy it yourself

It's not at all unlikely they took a "broken" computer into Best Buy. Best Buy told them it was the hard drive (meaning it almost surely wasn't the hard drive), and replaced it for them. They asked about the old one, and were assured it would be destroyed. Would you have asked to take it home before reading this story?

Old geek saying

If you want something wiped correctly, smash it yourself.

Even if Best Buy assured me they would destroy it, I would still grab a couple utilities to write nonsense bits onto the entire drive several times.

Of course, my biggest question is who is silly enough to throw out working storage space? My inner packrat insists that precious Gigabytes should coveted.

Why

Why would you pay a store to destroy something like a hard drive? Destroying it *yourself* is clearly way more fun.

If you want something done right...

...do it yourself [killdisk.com].

Too little too late.

"I'm not leaving myself open to identity theft," said Gerbus.

Quick! Close the barn door! The horse has bolted!

If the drive was being destroyed the store had no reason not to hand it over. He should have asked for it, or at the very least asked to be present at it's destruction.

Another selling point for my business

Isn't it just great when your comppetition fucks themselves for you, saves so much on PR.

Re:A question of time

So you are actually suggesting people open the hard drive and run a rare earth magnetic over the platters? Because anything short of an MRI is going to do jack squat to a modern hard drive. I have dropped a 1" cube nneodymiun magnet on a hard drive and it did nothing.

I have had friends try erasing hard drives with a bulk tape eraser. One failed to spin up. The other two would boot up fine and still had all thier data.

Re:Basic Consumer Practices????

excpet Best Buy TOLD them it was destroyed. That's the crux of this issue.

If a gargae mechanic tells you the installed new valves, do you take the engine apart to be sure they're not lying?

Many ways it gets out

I send back, on average, one drive every few months under warranty. Most times the drives have failed so I can't even low-level format it. I've always wondered what happens to these drives. Are they destroyed? Re-used? As drives get bigger and more and more files are placed on them, it's not surprising that people may *think* the drives are clean when they are not. And I know it's easy to blame the folks for letting the drive out of their possession, but think about it: they were told it was to be destroyed; people put files on their drives (that's what they're for); if the store offered to "dispose" of their old PC (many places do this), there's a reasonable expectation (especially if they're told) that their data would be destroyed, if not the hardware.

Former Employee....

As a former BestBuy/GeekSquad employee I can tell you that the company procedure was: 1.) Drill holes in hard drive. 2.) Send Computer to Best Buy Service Center to be discarded. When a customer would bring a computer in to be recycled I would open the cover with them standing there. I'd remove the hard drive and take a drill and put multiple 1/4 inch holes through the hard drive. I'd have the customer watch me do this and drill until they were happy. After that I would put the hard drive back into the computer and send it to a service center. 90% of your GeekSquad/BestBuy Employees have no idea what they are doing. They are also only getting paid $10 / hr. Don't expect much. There are one or two in each store that generally know more then you'd expect. But they are also only getting paid $10 / hr. If you want great service, It helps to have boobs. I'm not joking.

I think your last comment is way off base

probably 80% of /. users have boobs, and we _still_ get lousy service!

Not the couple's fault

I do not think this is the couple's fault at all. Best Buy supposedly was serviced to erase/destroy the hard drive. In a perfect world, people would take care of destroying their own data. Apparently, in this case, the couple seemingly didn't know how, so they hired Best Buy to take care of this - which is (usually) the next most responsible choice.

keep the drive, take the $$$ loss

I've never sold off or threw out or RMAed any of my hard drives. I give them a few good software whipes and use as paperweights or get an external case and there's another backup drive.
HDDs are around 50 cents or less per GB. Except those people who do their hardware shopping at BestBuy and arn't reading this.
If you really have to get it replaced look for someone who will let you keep the platters and just send back some of it. If they exist, have to keep the "refurbished" industry in business.

Warranty return is the problem

If I have a disk with a bad bearing or head crash, I have to send the drive back intact to claim my warranty and so I'm trusting my data to someone else. At work thats a violation of our security policy so we don't ever send disks back unless we are very sure what data was on it which effectively means drives that died within a few hours of being installed in a machine.

What needs to happen is the S.M.A.R.T. software on the drive needs to be a bit smarter and allow the diagnostics tools to coordinate with the manufacturers web site so that the company is sure the disk is in fact defective and they know the cause. If they determine that they don't want the disk back anyway, then let the consumer dispose of it. If they can repair the disk, then its most likely not an internal problem so if its repairable, the data should still be on it when it gets back.

Second shooter?

How did this thing end up at a flea market? I can think of a few scenarios where the BBY employee was unscrupulously selling broken or even working equipment at a flea market, but I kind-of doubt that. Not saying it's impossible just like to present a more likely scenario.

This is the fast-food of computer repair so the guy probably took out the old drive which reported several bad sectors in scandisk, dropped it in the trash and forgot about it. Later that day/week a bum that regularly dives their dumpster for crap to sell at a flea market did his normal job. Some dude out for the cheapest possible hard drive buys it then looks to see what is on it, because he's a perv and expects amature porn. Then because he rode the short bus he calls the previous owner to admit guilt.

Why is this hapless joe who accidentally mounted a hard drive then scoured it's contents closely enough to find social security numbers and the like guilty? It's like walking down a street and seeing a house with a door open. You can see the open door, and anything plainly visible from the street because of the open door. The second you walk through that door, you have trespassed.

But forget that amature porn collector.

Best Buy could solve all of this by issuing a 2lb hammer to all employees. It would help morale by providing an outlet for the rage incited by the latest management-speak directive from coorporate or the GM.

Nothing new

Several years ago, the small company worked for used a local mom & pop outfit to buy & repair the office computers. This particular shop made a point of offering "great deals" on refurbished and used equipment. Of course we bought only the best, all-new PCs from them...

Well, one cow-orker's HDD failed, and the aforementioned computer shop swapped it out for a new one. A little while later, we got a new employee in and ordered a new PC for him. When the "new" PC's C: drive was examined, it turned out to still have the first cow-orker's data on it!

I don't know which was worse, the fact that sensitive company data had been potentially exposed, or the fact that they sold us a used, known-bad hard drive as new?!

Geek Squad

I actually used to work for the geeksquad and there was a lot of problems there, so I will list them. 1. Employees took parts from computers we threw out home, including hard drives, and the managers really didn't care. 2. Employees copied customers files from their computers onto the store computers (aka, found porn on the customers computers, often of customers or of the people they knew and kept it). 3. Employees often didn't fix problems completely because they thought it was too much work. 4. And to top it off, I often found managers browsing through the files that the employees kept and thought it was the coolest thing in the world.