Throwing out the Enterprise with the Hard Disk

Organisations and individuals are increasingly store information and data about themselves on a wide variety of digital devices. These devices form an organisation’s ‘digital memory’ and as should be safeguarding against disclosure and breaches of integrity. Many organisations and individuals are employing various countermeasures often at considerable expense to protect this data. However, evidence would suggest that these assets are disposed of poorly with much of the data being intact or readily retrievable using simple forensic recovery techniques. This paper is a study of the ability to recover information from hard drives that are for sale at public auctions in Australia. The hard disks were taken from computers that were randomly selected and purchased at several auctions. The results from this study indicate careless disposal of data devices is widespread.