Identity Theft Protection Lock

Discarded, Donated or Re-sold Computers and Identity Theft

Without a doubt your personal identity is now embedded in computer technology. The personal computer has become a mainstream household item in homes right across America, almost as common as a hair dryer. When you buy a computer today and bring it into your home, you have instant access to the world’s new www information backbone. Just about any transaction is available on the web and ease of use and cost efficiency are driving forces behind online banking, bill paying, health insurance purchase, and airline booking and much more.

Notwithstanding the fact that the internet has made American life a lot easier, the technology necessary to secure the wealth of personal information contained in online transactions is more than lacking. The hot topic for individuals, companies and government agencies is security. With just a single internet connection, virtually any person in any place using a computer can gain access to confidential and proprietary information. Even deleted files are not safe.

According to International Data Corp. (IDC), 2006 corporate spending for IT security and business continuity solutions was approximately $155 billion. But if you read all the hype and are aware of all the marketing storms on security issues you will notice one generally overlooked security hole: retired personal computers, a back door into personal privacy. How hard is it to steal and use someone’s personal identity? To illustrate, let us examine the simple scenario of Joe Doe.

Joe is employed as an advertising director. He, like most of us, uses his personal computer to do online banking and keep track of his finances. Finally Joe saves enough money to buy the laptop of his dreams and decides to donate his PC to a favourite charity. To be sure his personal data is gone, Joe reformatted his hard drive to erase personal and previously deleted files. He then donates his old computer. A couple of weeks later Joe is at lunch with an important client and his credit card is rejected and Joe immediately checks his online account and finds out that someone has purchased a $3,500 telescope ten days before. Joe’s story is not isolated.

What Joe did not know is that a couple of identity thieves had discovered that all they needed to do was buy old computers from local charities and mine them for data. With no effort, they were able to recover Joe’s deleted files and Internet history from his old PC. Joe’s password for his financial file was protected but all the identity thieves did was download a password-breaking tool from the Internet and recover his protected password. Joe did not know it but his internet banking URL, along with the login ID, were stored in an Internet cookie located on his hard drive and Joe used the same password to permit access to both his financial records and online banking account. Joe’s personal identity was there for the taking. Joe’s deleted files, credit card data, billing data and transaction history were now exposed.

According to the FBI, identity theft is the fastest growing crime in America. How ironic is the amount of energy, time and money being invested to safeguard private data on a daily basis when the same data is simply discarded at the curb for anyone to pick up and exploit. The doors and windows are locked, but in the pawn shop sits an old computer containing a person’s complete identifying information. What about the online auction having rock bottom prices on computers containing your financial information.

Before we can plug this security hole that affects anyone owning a PC, we must realize the misconceptions of partioning and formatting disks to erase deleted files. The first step to protecting yourself is knowing what works and what does not work. A lot of us believe that repartitioning a disk will erase all deleted files stored on a hard drive. (Repartitioning is the process of changing the size and sequence of partitions on a disk to prepare the drive for formatting.) Repartitioning the drive simply alters the partition tables stored on the disk. Formatting a hard drive also does not permanently erase data.

The only way to guarantee all information has been removed from a hard drive is to overwrite all sectors on the disk with artificial information, such as overwriting configurations with random patterns of ones and zeroes. Hard drives can be sanitized and made ready for sale, donation or disposal by using a disk sanitizing tool. The disk sanitizing tool talks directly to the drive and overwrites all contents on the disk, including the boot record, master file tables, deleted files and contents of all files. At the completion of this process, users can be sure that all of their data has been erased, and the drive can then be safely sold, donated or disposed. There are many easy to use hard disk sanitizers on the market, but we have discovered one such solution that is compliant with the U.S. Department of Defenses disk sanitizing standards, one of the most rigorous data deletion standards in the world.

You are covered by our $1 Million Total Service Guarantee from the moment you enroll. If in the unfortunate event your identity is misused while you are a LifeLock member, we will pay professionals to resolve the problem for you – up to $1 million!

The creator of this solution is White Canyon Software, Inc. of Orem, Utah and we recommend their WipeDrive product. White Canyon’s WipeDrive has wiped over 20 million hard drives and is currently being used by the U.S. Department of Defence, U.S. Army and Navy, Department of Homeland Security, TimeWarner, Lockheed Martin, HP / Compaq, Prudential Financial, IBM, Procter & Gamble and other major corporations. Protect your identity.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 4:23 am and is filed under Identity Theft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.