Wipe It Or Risk It All

eBay is a great marketplace. Whenever I need some hard-to-find item, it's one of the first places I look. And I'm not alone. More than 75 million people other people do too.

So hearing about the latest security breaches that involved eBay and reselling in general didn't come as too much of a surprise.

I have always preached the importance of reformatting your hard drive before you dispose of it or give it away. Well, lots of people are now selling their old computers, smart phones and PDAs on eBay - without removing confidential, personal information first!

"Personal and corporate data is being sold on the open market through eBay, and it's also available to anyone who finds, steals or purchases a used smart phone or PDA from any other source," Nick Magliato, chief executive of Trust Digital, said in a statement. "The general public needs to immediately be made aware of this fact."

In a recent sampling of 10 mobile devices purchased on eBay, nearly 27,000 pages of sensitive data was retrieved.

According to Trust Digital, the users of these devices included the corporate counsel of a multibillion-dollar technology company that serves the legal market, a former employee of a publicly traded security software company, and an employee of a Web services company.

Many people think that simply deleting files makes them disappear - but that's not how it works. When you delete files, they remain on your hard drive and can be found by anyone wanting to access them. You can purchase software (known as wipe programs) to overwrite your information and make it completely unreadable.

So remember, before making that charitable donation or making a couple of bucks on eBay, erase your hard drive.

. . . Stephanie

technorati tags:Internet Security, Computers, computers and internet, Identity Theft, Stephanie Trahd
Wipe It Or Risk It All