Are Your Secrets at Risk?
The perils of discarding old computers

by: Bill Boas

Think twice before giving your old computer to a friend, charity,
second hand store, or selling it at a yard sale.

Its hard drive may still contain your important personal and
business financial data, e-mail, documents, Internet files, and a
host of other sensitive information for others to exploit as they
see fit.

I often pick up used computers to recycle to friends who have never
used one. It's amazing what I found on many of them. 

One young woman gave away an older Pentium machine with her America
Online account on it. Her password was set to "automatic entry,"
making it a simple matter to go on-line with her account, if anyone
wished.

Another left their computer at a neighbor's yard sale. On it was a
"Quicken" financial program without a password set. The original
owner's business, personal, and investment accounts were there to
scrutinize at will.

A small company gave away a computer with its financial, client,
and personnel evaluation records on it.

A computer from a thrift shop had e-mail files saved which revealed
the directions to its former owner's mountain retreat, combination
to the lock on the gate, further details about the property, and
other e-mails about sensitive personal relationships.

Major companies that upgrade their computers periodically, usually
have a technical staff to insure proprietary or sensitive files and
data are permanently deleted before the old machines go out the
door. They often delete everything, including the operating system,
by a high-level reformat of the hard drive.

This is usually enough to assure a "clean machine" but professional
or criminal data recovery specialists have the means to find files
still resident. Technically, it takes a low-level reformat of a
hard drive to remove all digital signatures of prior files. Not
everyone has the software or savvy to do this.

However, a home or small business user wants to be able to
demonstrate to a new user that their old computer works, and
doesn't want to reformat the hard drive or delete the operating
system. In this case, here's how to delete your sensitive files.

Most PCs use Microsoft's Windows operating system. For Windows
versions 95 and above, the "add/remove programs" icon of the
control panel allows you to uninstall programs like "Quicken" and
other programs containing personal data.

However, "Quicken," and many other financial and database programs
often make back-up files in separate folders which sometime don't
get deleted when the program does. These back-up folders and files
must be removed too.

The "My Documents" folder is another repository of Microsoft Word
and Excel files that should be purged as well. Removing these and
the many other applications programs containing personal files
usually only reroutes them to the "recycle bin" with recent Windows
operating systems. It's then necessary to "empty the recycle bin"
to finally delete them from the hard drive.

The same applies to files of Internet activity. With Microsoft's
Internet Explorer Web browser, a person's record of Internet
surfing is saved in a "temporary Internet files" folder in the
Windows directory. This folder has several sub-directories bearing
random alphabetical names that contain all your Internet travels to
inspect. Also there's a "recent" and "history" folder in the
Windows directory to expunge if you don't want anyone to know where
and when you were on the Internet.

The Netscape Navigator web browser puts these files in a directory
with sub-directories named "cache." Delete it, and you've sent all
the files and sub-directories to the "recycle bin". Again, remember
to empty this as well.

After sensitive files and programs are removed from the drive, the
"defrag" utility, a system tool of the Windows operation system
should be run to completely rewrite and reorganize the remaining
data on the hard drive. This overwrites the portions of the disk
where proprietary files were located, preventing recovery of any
vestiges of the files.

Every computer is unique in how its user organized files, so it's
difficult here to describe every action needed to permanently
delete potentially revealing files and programs.

The importance of deleting files on a Windows-based PC equally
applies to computers running other operating systems like Apple-
Macintosh and Linux. These systems have unique file structures and
deletion procedures to follow to insure that private files are
gone.

MAC users send their unwanted files to the `trashbin' then empty
it. Linux users rarely give up their machines at all, but if one
did, the command "rm -r *.*" will irrevocably remove files.

It's great to recycle a perfectly good older computer to a new
user, but be aware of what might be compromised and take action to
remove files. If you aren't sure about permanently and safely
deleting files, call in a competent friend or colleague who is.

If you don't, you might be subject to a cyber criminal stealing
your identity or worse.

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