A study of 200 hard drives bought on eBay this year reveals that over 70 per cent contained sensitive personal or business data. German data recovery firm O&O Software was able to recover 3.3 million files, including 40,000 Word documents, 15,000 Excel spreadsheets and about 50 complete email inboxes. In one case a large German bank left details of customer credit ratings in files which O&O said were only protected by being labelled ‘Highly Confidential’. The report also mentions finding what it calls ‘onion drives’. These are drives that have been formatted by users and still left with data written onto the hard drive…
