The Leftovers: A Data Recovery Study

To demonstrate just how easy, common and dangerous it is when data is improperly removed before used electronics are resold, we purchased a total of 200 used hard disk drives and solid state drives from eBay and Craigslist in the first quarter of 2016.

Here are the top findings from our study:

67 percent of the used hard disk drives and solid state drives hold personally identifiable information and 11 percent contain sensitive corporate data.
Upon analyzing the 200 used drives, company emails were recovered on 9 percent of the drives, followed by spreadsheets containing sales projections and product inventories (5 percent) and CRM records (1 percent).
36 percent of the used HDDs/SSDs containing residual data had data improperly deleted from them by simply dragging files to the ‘Recycle Bin’ or using the basic delete button.

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Understand the difference between improper data ‘deletion’ methods and secure data erasure

Protect your customers’ privacy when buying back/reselling used electronics

Access the right data removal technology/tools to minimize security risks and guarantee regulatory compliance

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