July 17th, 2011 by peter.bassill

Update 1

Project Ebay is moving along very nicely. To date 10 drives have been purchased across a reasonable spread of reclamation businesses and private individuals and thus far each and every drive has given up the previous owners information. That is a 100% success rate at recovering previous owners data.

Of course, all of these drives have now undergone a DoD 7 pass wipe to make sure they are completely erased, but I have pulled back:

• Email
• Banking records
• iTunes collections
• Personal photo’s
• Very very personal photos
• University assignments
• Source code
• CAD images

The home users I am not too surprised with, but the corporates? I am certain that the business entities engaging these reclamation organizations would be shocked that in many cases the drives were just formatted, and in one case the all I needed to do was hook the drive up and mount it.