What happened to your old computer??
This is a terrifying story I saw on TV..and decided to share it with you all...
What happens to the old computers that we discard almost every second year?? Do we generally format them and ensure that all the personal details that were available on it were deleted ??
Recently a gang was  caught(For political correctness.. country not mentioned..) collecting old machines for charity to be distributed to poor children in Africa.. 1000s of old PCs were shipped...Now a fraud has been discovered..these computers are being used by Scamsters to either sell your personal details to marketing companies or worse use these details and bank accounts to solicit businesses in YOUR name...
When you decide to donate your PC out of charity....make sure you format the hard disk...frankly a better thing would be to replace the hard disk..and crush the old one...We never know who would lay their hands on them...
Not only Computers....
everything with memory or storage capacity can be tapped into
MOBILE PHONES - The ones with the camera & video-Cam are really vunerable because they can give away a lot of info.
PDA.
DIGITAL CAMERA.
FLASH DRIVES
USB HARD DISKS
LAPTOPs
Especially when they go in for repair.
Yes he is true even if we delete/erase/format the data is still retractable - just connect the device, load the specific hack software & give command - "unformat" or "unerase" etc & it will reveal all the data stored on it - Movies ,Pirated software, family photos, vids etc.
The best way is to erase all data & copy a 100MB vid or audio file & keep copying it till the disk is full.
If you want you can erase it once more.
For the sake of argument, lets say it was Nigeria.
The old drives can be bought for £15 and in the case of one poor guy, they had ALL his details, passwords, bank account details....the lot!
Reformatting a disk does not erase the data on the disk, only the address tables. Even after reformatting a hard disk someone with the know-how will be able to recover most or all the data that was on the disk.
The safest method to completely remove data is to overwrite the disk.
Eraser can do such a job:
eraser
A free program to encypt your files:
truecrypt