Getting a new hard drive? Throwing out the old one? Think again! A study by two MIT students was highlighted in the news today. The two had bought a bunch of (158) used disk drives and analyzed them for retrieval of any confidential personal or corporate data. What they found was a big surprise! 129 drives were still functional and on 28 of them little or no efforts had been made to erase the saved information. Among those, a disk from an ATM machine in Illinois with a years worth of transactions, and a drive with 5000 credit card numbers! Only 12 disks had been properly sanitized. Identity theft made REAL easy! The study is published in the January/February 2003 issue of IEEE Security and Privacy, a journal published by the IEEE Computer Society. Good to know: Deleting or even formatting your HD is not good enough. The MS Windows 'format' function does not delete every block, but only checks whether it can be re-written. Special software can help though; some of them are even free of charge (e.g. Eraser). If you trash your drive, hammer, scissors, and matches are probably still the most effective ways. Unless it gets into the hands of Convar Systeme Deutschland GmbH: they may still be able to recover the data, as they did with some of the HDs from the WTC after 9/11!