We reached the end of this adventure, picking up from Part 6 and the last drive. This drive we are approaching strictly from a Forensics point of view, no file recovery to be had here. Then again, files cannot be recovered if the content of the files are actually trashed as the files on this drive were.
The summation of discovery about this drive brings this experiment to a close, and not a moment too soon. We end up finding just about nothing here, except for a whole lot of email addresses, as opposed to a lot of legal documents. If I were a spammer, I would be in heaven right now with all the potential new addresses to send to.
This little project will come across as rough and amateurish, and for good reason, I started off wanting to answer the question of IF I could find data on hard drives bought off eBay, not what I could find. I found quickly once I got started that the better question was WHAT I could find on the drives and had to refocus more than a few times. Clearly the answer to the original question is, Yes … yes I can find something left behind on a supposedly “clean” drive sold on eBay, and the drives have been either wiped completely or destroyed since I poked around the crumbs left behind and I did not use any of the information that I gathered to look up any of the individuals (aside from the web site in Part 6).
This experience got me to thinking about Insider Threats, how something so simple as throwing out an old hard drive could be huge deal. Granted, not an intentional leak, but imagine what sort of foot hold this might give to a potential bad guy, its frightening and with it being right next to the adult film section – a little disgusting.
The moral of this story is simply this – Cleaning a hard drive before getting rid of it is not hard … and if you cannot clean it, then pull it out of the machine and smash it with a hammer, repeatedly to destroy it.