Journalism students say they paid $40 in Ghana for a second-hand hard drive that contained information about multi-million-dollar defense contracts between the Pentagon, U.S. Department of Homeland Security and one of the largest military contractors in the United States.
One of the students said the hard drive was purchased in an open-air market in the coastal town of Tema from a local dealer who bought second-hand hard drives by the cargo load.
The drive contained
Too many employees fail to erase or encrypt sensitive data on their mobile devices before tossing them out, say researchers from British phone company BT Group, the University of Glamorgan in Wales, and Edith Cowan University in Australia.
To prove its point, the team recently purchased 161 discarded handheld devices from online auction sites and secondhand outlets in Britain and Australia. One in five, found the researchers, contained details about salaries, company finances, b
One year ago, Hank Gerbus had his hard drive replaced at a Best Buy store in Cincinnati. Six months ago, he received one of the most disturbing phone calls of his life.
"Mr. Gerbus," Gerbus recalls a stranger named Ed telling him. "I just bought your hard drive in Chicago."
Gerbus, a 77-year-old retiree, was a
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Find out what happens when 60 Minutes follows one computer recycling company's e-waste from the U.S. to one of the most toxic places on Earth.
PC Disposal is the first
computer
recycling firm to
offer a
$1,000,000 service
guarantee that
your
sensitive data will be
completely removed or destroyed.
