Donating Your PC? Wipe the Hard Drive First
Information from recycled PCs sent from the UK to Africa, including banking information, is being sold in West Africa for less than £20 each. These PCs were recycled or donated without having their hard drives wiped.
It discovered that fraudsters in Nigeria were able to find internet banking data stored on recycled PCs sent from the UK to Africa. The information can be found on a PC's hard disk, which is easy to access if the drive is not wiped before sending. Source: BBC NewsRecently I replaced the hard drive on my work laptop with a new one. IT let me do it myself. Part of the process was wiping the old hard drive. It didn't have anywhere near the info that the hard drives on my home PCs do, but I wiped it anyway.
If you want to erase your hard drive, you can create a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD, which is free. It has several hard drive wiping tools.
There's also the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD4Win), which is a Windows-based tool, is also free, and has hard drive wiping tools.
Alternatively, you could go to Download.com and search for "wipe" and "free" (license type) and find plenty of freeware tools that will wipe your hard drive.
Don't let your hard drive get away from you without erasing it.
Tags: Hard Drive, Security, Technology, Software
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2 comments:
I would be very careful when using free software to erase your hard drive. Unfortunately, many of them don't do everything they should. If you really want to make sure everything is removed from your hard drive, you need to find a program that meets the U.S. Department of Defense standard for disk-sanitization. I personally use DriveWasher by StompSoft. It's the only commercial-grade program I could find that didn't cost an arm and a leg.
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