OT: No more privacy?
- From: "Jim P" <Enamanga@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:21:06 -0500
Drinks are on me while I tell you about something I discovered
In no way is this advertising for any company or any kind of spam. This is
just some FYI.
If you already knew about this, enjoy your drink and accept my apology.
I do some IT work here at work when needed and one of our guys took on the
job of adding another harddrive to his computer.
I told him to make sure he does not plug in his old drive (which had all of
his old data on it) until the new drive had an operating system installed
and running.
Well, he did not listen. When it came time to install Windows XP he
formatted the wrong drive. Yep, the one I told him not to install.
The whole reason to all of this was because his old drive was running slow
and we suspected it had a Virus and tons of spyware.
Anyways, now all of his data was gone. So I did some research and bought a
program called File Recover 6.2 for Windows. I took the time to read a
little about what this program can and can't do. So I installed it and
pointed to the drive I wanted to recover. Let me say this, it works! We were
able to recover almost everything. Some of the stuff ended up with different
names. (maybe I screwed up on some of the options) As I was doing this I
noticed you can recover memory sticks, camera flash cards, almost anything
that holds data. So I grabbed my 4 gig memory stick and went at it. I could
not believe what I was able to bring back.
Now, about 2-3 months ago I loaned it to a co-worker so he can move some
files to his home PC. It brought back eveything that he put on that stick
and lets just say it was not work related material.
So, lets say you and the missus decide to take a few "private photos" and
delete them after viewing them. Now lets just say that you lose your camera
or memory card and that falls into the hands of a "computer nerd". Would
you want pics/movies of you and the wife showing up on the internet? So I
called one of my buddies that is pretty heavy into computers. He told me
that places like Best Buy and others that repair PC's find memory sticks and
memory cards plugged into them all the time and the repair techs, when
bored, go searching through them quite a bit and it is amazing what they
find. He then told me about this memory stick that has a built in chip
(can't remember the name) and it is password protected. If someone gets
their hands on it and trys to crack the password, the chip burns up and it
is unusable. Sounds like a good investment.
He was making fun of me at the end of our conversation, asking me if I lived
under a rock and how I did not know this. Well, this was actually my first
time having to do data recovery like this, so what can I say?
Now, I always see the posts on other newsgroups stating that your harddrive
is not safe and I always knew that to be somewhat true, but lets just say
that after this
I will think twice about leaving them lying around or letting people borrow
them.
Ride Safe
Jim P
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: OT: No more privacy?
- From: Andy aka Big Stinkie
- Re: OT: No more privacy?
- Prev by Date: Re: It's looking like Roach may be a prophet
- Next by Date: Re: OT: No more privacy?
- Previous by thread: Motorcycles are dangerous
- Next by thread: Re: OT: No more privacy?
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
