October 18

We’ve talked about data safety and protection before. Besides the destruction of information from crashes and deletion, threats to your data’s safety come in the form of threats to its security, and that affects your privacy. Insecure data on current PCs and in our discussions, discarded PC hard drives, is a hot target for criminal activity and identity theft.

Tech columnist Brian Krebs has a great article where he tries to tackle the challenge of explaining why a hacker would want to get into your PC. He focuses in on the myriad of ways a hacked PC can be used to cause trouble in your life, online and off. What’s interesting is that most of the items listed are some sort of data or personal information.

Ways that cyber crooks can put your PC, in particular its data, to criminal use - via Krebs on Security

While we focus on recovering lost files and data in our service, we always like to remind customers that the data saved on their hard drives and digital storage devices should be deleted securely when drives are discarded. Krebs’ diagram gives plenty of examples of how the bits and bytes of information we store on our PCs can be used for all sorts of nefarious behaviour.

You can use CBL Data Shredder to erase sensitive information and protect your privacy.

Source: Krebs on Security

Category: data loss prevention

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Comments

  1. Ananiko
    Nov 23, 01:01 AM

    etbe: If you wanted to do a DIY self-destruct, it would be quite filesbae to plug a 555 sine generator into a little transformer attached to the DIMMs for not much money. I don’t imagine it would take too much current to destroy the RAM. I might even test it sometime. ;) puts it on the list. You could do a the broken , and use thermite, but that’s probably too expensive.As for purging the RAM, I was thinking more of an IC on board near the RAM which would hijack the bus and stick a pile of data into the memory. This is beyond the realm of DIY though, obviously, requiring some cooperation from the motherboard manufacturer.If the only kind of people we’re worrying about here are the people who only have the resources to nick some DIMMs, then I think well-covered self-destructive RAM should solve the issue nicely. Unless that’s just an initial attempt before they step up to torture, which could be a problem. If you’re lucky, all they want is your uid 0 password. :P

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