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EBay Buyers Want What’s In Your Hard Drive
John Stith
Staff Writer
2006-02-01
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Maybe you should clean out your hard drive before you put it up for sale on eBay. People may want to see what's in it. A researcher suggested on Monday that people search for hard drives with lots of interesting information on hard drives for sale at the online auction house. This includes personal information like credit card numbers, let alone what you download.
Harvard professor Simson Garfinkel works on the project for Harvard's Center for Research on Computation and Society. He said he's been buying hard drives on eBay for about five years. He makes the purchase and then looks over what's on the hard drives. He reported buying 236 drives and seven of them contained well over 300 recoverable credit card numbers.
TechWeb News quoted Garfinkel saying, "I think that many drives sell for more than their market value. He suggested the reason is people are looking for information.
One thing he pointed out in the interview with TechWeb was one drive had 11,609 unique credit card numbers. It was sold by a medical center. They also sold another drive with 81 additional numbers. They said one drive came from an ATM at 827 sets of numbers, a grocery with another 1,356 numbers, and car dealerships with 498 names. Interesting numbers, indeed.
This shows one more avenue for carelessness to get its grip into things. More must be done to combat these problems and to teach these companies and organizations to be more thoughtful when dealing with these records.
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About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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