The used hard drive with 20GB capacity contained, according to
Spiegel, internal alarm plans on how the Police should handle
"specific incidences" such as hostage or kidnapping situations,
gave contact names of who to contact in the crisis management
group, and tactical orders and analysis of political security
situations.
According to the report, such information is strictly
confidential and should be available only to top level people of
the intelligence services, the head of police, and the executive
group around the Minister of Interior Schönbohm.
After a student from the city of Potsdam bought it for €20,
without knowing about the sensitive content, Minister Jörg
Schönbohm immediately initiated an investigation, to find out how
the information ended up being sold over eBay and whether the blame
was down to a third party or leaked as part of a criminal
act.
This oversight by the Brandenburg Police is not the first time
a hard drive sold over eBay has triggered a security breach and
publicly exposed an organisation.
Last summer, mobile security specialists Pointsec conducted
research to find out how many hard drives they could buy over eBay
containing sensitive company information to prove the point that
very few companies thoroughly wipe clean or re-format their discs
before disposing of them. The first one they bought over eBay for
just €8 contained the access and log-in codes to a major financial
services group.
Pointsec found that they were able to read 7 out of 10 hard
drives bought over the internet at auctions such as eBay, for less
than the cost of a McDonald's meal, all of which had supposedly
been "wiped-clean" or "re-formatted".
Peter Larsson, CEO of Pointsec Mobile Technologies, said "Even
when companies or individuals believe they have wiped the hard
drive clean, it is blatantly clear how easy it is to retrieve
sensitive information from them both during their current lifetime
and beyond it."
He added that this week's exposure of leaked and highly
critical information from the Brandenburg police in Germany
"reinforces how important it is to never let mobile devices or hard
drives leave the office without being adequately protected with
encryption and strong password protection – even after they have
been discarded."
Pointsec recommends that, if the data on your old equipment is
not encrypted, make sure that you re-format the device at least
eight times before disposal,* or use professional "wiping-clean"
software to erase the data. It adds that, if the information is
very sensitive and you want to ensure that not even the cleverest
hacker will ever be able to read the old hard drive, burn it.
* OUT-LAW reader Jason Bean says:
"In most operating systems, most noteably Windows, formatting the
hard drive does not actually erase anything except the master boot
record and partition table. Data can still be recovered very easily
no matter how many times you format. Formatting the drive eight
times will only waste your time and not erase your data."
Jason says the only real way to erase sensitive data without
destroying the drive is to run commercial erasure programs. "The
best method of doing so is writing random 1's and 0's to the drive
several times," he says.
