Watching tonight’s edition of Real Story about fraudsters picking up bank account details from peoples’ dumped hard drives was certainly food for thought. The one time I dumped an old PC I made sure to wipe the hard drive but this will certainly make me more methodical in future.
Of course the show didn’t give any advice on how to wipe a drive, just a warning that not doing it was bad. The linked article above at least has some help in this direction. Bare in mind that just deleting files or reformatting a drive is insufficient; it doesn’t take much to undelete the data. My recommendation would be to use the free DBAN utility. If I know you, I’ll come round and do it for free. For anyone else it’ll be a tenner. Companies are more than welcome to get in contact and I’ll do them a quote.
Tags: technology, tv