"My brother-in-law just bought a used Intel 20" iMac. The seller was a nice looking blonde, who didn't wipe the disk. You can probably see where this is going, but it's better than that.
For some reason, he thought he needed her password to reinstall the system, so he called her and she gave it to him. Well, he had already seen some pornographic pictures on the hard drive that weren't password protected. Most of them weren't too explicit, aside from a couple of [oral sex] shots. But the password uncovered some videos where she gets sodomized, apparently by her boyfriend, or only one guy at any rate.
Now the pics and vids are all on his iPod. He pulled them off the computer.
It's one thing to drag your personal files to the trash and then empty it - lots of people undoubtedly think that will be enough to protect them. A few more knowledgeable ones understand that trashed files can still be recovered, so they want to remove that sensitive data more completely. This usually means asking a friendly computer nerd for advice or help, or Googling for freeware, or paying for some commercial piece of software that will overwrite data the necessary number of times. (Editor's note: Mac users can use the Secure Empty Trash menu to securely delete files.) A tiny number of people - call them "paranoid security experts" - will go the final step and drill, bash, or bend their hard drives so that the data will be totally unrecoverable."
Click on the link below for the full article:
http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/424
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