Identity Theft by Selling a Used Computer

Selling a Used Computer and Identity Theft

Identity Theft is the fastest growing crime over the last few years. The amount of data stored on computer systems is an ideal repository for criminals to attempt identity theft. When someone either discards or sells a used computer system, hard drive, or external storage device most people do not appropriately sanitize the media, but rather delete or format a disk falsely believing all the data is gone.

A friend of mine recently bought a new fancy rig costing $2,000 or so. When I asked him what he did with his old system, he said he sold it on craigslist for $550 to help fund the new purchase. "Did you put in a new hard drive?" "No, but I reformatted it."

There is a misconception among those unfamiliar with the inner workings of computers that deleting files and formatting hard drives removes data completely. Think back and try to remember all the files you deleted over the past 10 years. Did you ever delete financial data, such as accounting spreadsheets, bank numbers, credit card data, or personal information? How about scanned documents, such as mortgage paperwork, driver's licenses, birth certificates, or pay stubs? What happened to those computers or hard drives with which you think you deleted those files from? Did you sell the PC like my friend, donate it to an organization, or just throw it away? Who has used that computer since, and what may they have found? These are all important and scary questions.

I recall a thesis paper written by some graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that outlined this very threat. They had purchased 150 or so used hard drives from eBay to study how much personal data was left on old systems. They reportedly found medical records, email correspondence, corporate financial data, illicit personal photographs, thousands of credit card numbers, and even an ATM drive with numerous bank accounts. This is a very real concern for every computer owner, especially my friend now that the system is out of his possession.

What Deleting and Formatting Really Does

I proceeded to give my friend a little education on how computers store information and what deleting and formatting actually does. Basically, the hard drive is broken down into sectors in which the data is stored. In the figure below, suppose File A is a Tax return for 2007. 2008 comes around and you delete 2007's record and the file appears gone. All that has happened is the Operating System (OS) has marked those sectors as available and removed it from the user's view. It is still easily recoverable through a variety of software. The file still exists and is in just as good of shape as before you deleted it.

Online Backup and the Consequences of Data Loss For Business

Online backup, why is it so crucial?

Most companies, business corporations and organisations nowadays are totally dependent on their computer data; and the value of that data is not easy to cost. However, the cost of a data loss to any business is very significant, not only in the man hours that it would take to recover it, if recovery were possible; but also financially.

What price can be put on lost invoices for goods and services, records of monies owed to the company and lost details of every customer and supplier. Add to that the records stored of every product a company may stock, the quantities on stock, the amount on order, the supplier of that product and the cost and selling prices. How much would it cost your company to manually reinstate that lot if your data was lost? Online backup is the most cost effective way to prevent against data loss.

Just to emphasise how vulnerable your data is, how many times recently have you read in local newspapers about businesses being broken into and computers stolen. Apparently there were over 20,000 computers stolen last year. What happened to the companies who were affected by that? How many closed their doors forever, how many gave up shortly after; total data loss is as disastrous as that. If only they had chosen online backup.

Then there was the even bigger list of companies who suffered total hard disc failure, had viruses, fires on the premises and flood damage.

So how do you back up your records, disc, tape; and how often do you back them up; religiously every night, or when you remember? The beauty of online backup is it saves your data as you write it. If you backed up your data the night before, how much information has been input if your hard drive fails at 4.00 pm? How much crucial information and how many total man hours of work will have been lost during that period?

Data loss can happen to organisations even with good backup protection; but will all items be on the tape or disc, such as contacts, email messages and other important items perhaps stored in folders in Exchange, Outlook, Domino and GroupWise. They would if you were using remote backup and elected to back them up as part of your online data backup.

Who do you call if you back data up yourself to tapes etc and you can not restore your data; a very expensive IT expert? Customer service and assistance with data restoration, comes free with all good online data backup companies.

On line backup companies offer the most reliable and cost-effective solution for bringing your business back online, in the event of any data loss or disaster scenario.

So, I hope that I have managed to emphasise the importance of online back up; and how critical it is in this computer age, to every business and organisation, from large conglomerates down to the one man business. You will be very fortunate if one day disaster does not strike your data system and if you are not fully protected by online backup, why not look into it now before it is too late.

How to Backup Your Computer Hard Drive

In life, you always need to have a backup plan, in case your initial idea wouldn't work out exactly as expected. The same principle applies when you work on your computer. Because a huge number of people today depend highly on their computers to get their work and business up and running, you can only imagine how vital maintaining files can be. Back then, humans depended on floppy disks and hard copy print outs to store their documents, but today, there are easier options of keeping files for you. Note this: It is very important to keep reminding yourself to backup your computer hard drive.

First of all, why is there a need to backup your computer hard drive? Computer experts cannot stress enough how valuable it is to regularly do this. If you have tons of very important files on your PC, such as documents, photos, web pages, spread sheets, presentations, and others, you wouldn't want to lose them, right? Creating a back up of the contents of your hard drive will save you the woes of finding for ways to recover them, especially after a disaster like a computer crash or a nasty virus.

So how do you go about it? If you are running on Microsoft Windows as your operating system, it has a built in wizard that automatically does the backup for your. This backup can be restored by you at a later time, or whenever you need to retrieve your files. You can invoke this option from Microsoft Windows by going to the Accessories menu from your Program Files. Select System Tools and click on Backup. Follow the instructions on the wizard and you're ready to go.

However, that is only one option, and not too many people look to it as their main choice for backup. The best thing you can do is to purchase an external hard drive for your computer. Typically, you can get an extra 300 GB or more to save your stuff when you use an external hard drive, which conveniently connects to your PC via USB. In some stores, you can purchase external hard drives that can hold as much as 1 terabyte, or 1,000 GB.

When you backup your files, ensure that they are sorted out into appropriately labeled folders, so it can be easy for you to find them later on. Some people zip their folders first before doing so, while protecting with a password is a must for specific files. Creating a backup is just a matter of making a copy of all your files, and saving them onto your external hard drive. It's simple, but a very necessary chore.

Backing Up Data on CD's and DVD's

Most people have some or many documents on their computer that they just cannot afford to lose. That is why backing up your important files on a CD or DVD disc may be a good idea.
Today, our computers are very high tech, and a lot of them have some sort of data recovery tool installed. However, in some cases our computers do not work as they are supposed to and something goes wrong. This is why backing up data on CD or DVD discs could be a smart move. If your primary backup fails, or something happens to your computer, you have an external copy of the files.

CD's are very cheap and they can store up to 700 MB of data. This should be enough for regular files. If you need to backup lots of music and/or video files, you may want to consider using DVD's which regulary stores about 4.7 GB of data.
Both CD's and DVD's come in two formats CD-R and CD-RW (or DVD-R and DVD-RW). CD-R discs are cheaper, but they can only be used once. CD-RW (the RW stands for re-writable) discs can be used as many times as you wish.
Do some research before you buy your discs. Some computers may not be able to burn DVD's.

All you need to do now is to burn your selected files to the disc you have chosen and voila, your files are backed up, ready to be restored if anything goes wrong with your computer.

Restore Deleted Data

Right now, you could be reading this this article because you or someone in your family has deleted a file on your computer system that you want to restore. Deleting files by mistake is a common problem, but it does not necessarily mean that your file, or files, are gone forever. Based on how much you have used the computer since the file was deleted, there is a chance that you might be able to retrieve it.

When someone decides to delete a file, the hard drive doesn't actually delete it in that sense. Once you decide to delete a file and you even empty your recycling bin the computer doesn't delete the file, it just makes the computer aware that the file can now be overwritten if that is needed. If the computer has not been used much since the file was deleted and therefore has not overwritten the file yet, you should be able to restore it.

The software you need to perform an operation like this can be found on the internet for free, although most of these software programs costs a few dollars. Upon downloading a file recovery program there should also be a guide to that specific program that will guide you through the actual process. Keep in mind though, that the file may have been overwritten during installation of other programs after you deleted it.

In some cases the hard drive itself has been damaged physically. In that case, you should contact a professional service online, or in your local area to help you or to guide you through the process. In general, it is safer to let an expert retrieve lost files, than trying to retrieve it yourself.