Survey: 40% of hard drives bought on eBay hold personal, corporate data
Buyers found data on everything from corporate spreadsheets to e-mails and photos
A New York computer forensics firm found that 40% of the hard disk drives it recently purchased in bulk orders on eBay contained personal, private and sensitive information — everything from corporate financial data to the Web-surfing history and downloads of a man with a foot fetish.
Kessler International conducted the study over a six-month period, buying up disk drives ranging in size from 40GB to 300GB from the United States and Canada. The firm, which completed its research about two weeks ago, bought a total of 100 relatively modern drives, the vast majority of them Serial ATA.
