Drive Slagging Featured In LISA '04 Presentation on eecue.com : Dave Bullock / eecue

In 2004 Simson Garfinkel gave a talk at the USENIX LISA conference about data on old hard drives. The report he wrote was actually what made us decide to do the drive slagging site in the first place. He featured our method of data removal in his slides which can be found at the link below. If you just want to see the slides click the permalink.

Used Disk Drives

Speaker: Simson Garfinkel, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

View Presentation Slides (PDF)

Between 1998 and 2002, Simson Garfinkel purchased 200 used hard drives on eBay. Analyzing these hard drives with a simple UNIX-based system, he found a treasure trove of personal and business confidential information--information he never should have seen.

In this talk, Garfinkel will discuss the information he found and why it was findable. He'll give a brief survey of how filesystems lay information on the hard drive, how and when that information is overwritten, and what tools you can use to perform forensic analysis and properly sanitize media. Finally, he'll show how the results of this research are applicable to digital cameras, flash memory, MP3 players, Palm Pilots, and a wide variety of other systems.

Posted on: Tuesday, January 18th 2005

Category: Technology(99)