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From Asahi Shimbun
A man who won an Internet auction for used hard disks soon discovered that he was in the possession of confidential and sensitive government information that he had no business reading.
At first, the man, who owns an information technology company, was puzzled when he found repeated mention in the file names of Kanagawa Prefecture.
But he was in for a greater shock when he used recovery software and found that the files on the hard disks contained mountains of data compiled by the Kanagawa prefectural government.
The data included everything from individuals who were behind on their taxes and the amount; documents considering the seizure of assets; documents related to contract bid amounts; rosters of employees at public schools; and even design blueprints for electric power plants and water supply works.
(Score: 2) by Acabatag on Tuesday December 10 2019, @06:55PM (1 child)
I once bought an old laptop at a University Surplus auction. There were a lot of laptops sold at auction that day, and the notice at the auction stated they all had their hard drives removed. This was in the era of the Pentium 4 laptop, but the one that I bid on was much older, I think it sported a 486 processor. I was buying it for almost nothing for my collection. It turned out to have a hard drive, with Windows 3.1, and a large amount of medical research data, with entries assigned to children by name. Obviously I just deleted it all.
The apes in charge don't always know what to do, especially when it's not the typical hardware they are used to being apeshit destructive toward. Thank goodness, because the most interesting old hardware sometimes eludes their gorilla scrutiny. I also once bought a SparcStation at that auction that had belonged to a professor. He had no password on his account and just abandoned it with his home directory, etc just sitting there.
(Score: 2) by Acabatag on Tuesday December 10 2019, @07:01PM
I'll add that I also have a rather nice top-end for it's time laptop that came with Windows XP and a locked account. The flea market seller told me that it would need a new hard drive. So I ran lophtcrack on it, deleted all the lawyer's legal documents they had left on it, and it's a very nice laptop. A good machine for retro XP-era games.