Hey, it doesn't have to be anything dangerous, just embarrassing, like if somebody peeked into some deep part of your hard disk by chance and discovered all your weird pornography.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Using data forensics tools when you don't know what you're looking for (how do you know a string of characters you've found is a social security number?) sounds infeasible at best. I mean, looking through gigabytes of data to locate a several-byte-long number? You must definitely have some bad enemies in that case.
A couple of close friends who specialize in network security and forensics will buy hard drives off of eBay as training tools. There's a particular piece of software they use that has a myriad of pre-configured regex settings for recovering very specific patterns of data. Index the drive, search index for <x>, read results. A box of eight drives once yielded 36 sets of SSNs with matching birthdates and legal names. Also once nabbed nearly a hundred from one 'dead' drive that came from a realtor's home computer.
If you don't know who your things are going to, you don't know what they'll do with them.
Depends, have you put any of your personal information on it that can be used to steal your identity?
I think Warp's question was more along the lines of "who would bother checking if you had?" Using data forensics tools when you don't know what you're looking for (how do you know a string of characters you've found is a social security number?) sounds infeasible at best. I mean, looking through gigabytes of data to locate a several-byte-long number? You must definitely have some bad enemies in that case.
grep '[0-9]\{3\}-[0-9]\{2\}-[0-9]\{4\}' /dev/hdb1
oh look, I just searched your entire hard drive for a social security number.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Warp wrote:
Who would be interested in the contents of your HD?
These days everybody seems to have a file named "PASSWORDS.TXT" on prominent display on the desktop. This contains everything ranging from forum passwords to Paypal credentials and credit card numbers. I honestly doubt anyone on this forum would forget to delete them before sending off their computer to someone, but it's probably for the best to be absolutely sure.
