Your Financial Data Sold for $65
// August 28th, 2008 // Give Me A Break!, Technology
Well, this definitely doesn’t apply to everyone — but it did affect over a million people in the United Kingdom. A laptop owned by a company that is actually supposed to protect financial data was sold on eBay for $65, but luckily it was sold to an IT person who reported it to the companies whose data was on the hard drive.
I’m not surprised when I hear stories like this — considering that the same thing happened to me at a garage sale a few years ago. I went to a sale here in Mt. Lebanon and saw a Compaq Presario laptop that had a piece of masking tape on the lid with $10 on it. At first I thought it was a goof-up and that she meant to put $100 on it. I walked up to the owner and said “this is really only $10?”. She said “Yup” and of course I said “so..what’s wrong with it?”
She said that nothing was wrong with it and that I could plug it in to confirm that it was OK. I told her that I wanted to and lo and behold, a Windows 2000 login screen came up after I turned it on. I asked her if she could tell me the username/password for the laptop so I could see what programs were on the computer and she told me that she didn’t remember it. She then said that it was her old work laptop and that they gave it to her once she got a new one.
Being the geek that I am, I know/knew that the base install of Windows 2000 has “administrator” as the username and no password for the password and it let me right in. I turned off the laptop, handed the owner her $10, said “Thanks!” and walked out. When I got home, I logged back in and got the surprise of my life.
It turns out that the previous owner of the laptop was a mortgage broker and that neither she nor her previous company wiped the drive before she was given the laptop. A basic search of the computer revealed mortgage applications with all kinds of personal information (names, social security numbers, job information, etc.), emails, documents and pictures. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! Imagine if I was a criminal! I had tons of information to commit identity theft with. She hadn’t deleted a thing!
When I bought the laptop (but before I saw what was on it), I had intended on reselling the laptop after I had wiped the drive anyways — but I definitely needed to make sure to do it now! I pulled out my trusty DBAN CD to make sure that none of the information on the laptop would ever be found again.
And if you think that’s the only time I bought something with data already on it, you’d be wrong. I’ve bought an HP Jornada and multiple Palm PDAs with all of the content intact. Unbelievable!
