Reuters - Laptops containing sensitive financial details and all manner of corporate secrets can be snapped up at auctions for a pittance, a security firm revealed Wednesday.
Stockholm-based Pointsec Mobile Technologies said it bought 100 laptop computers from a host of Internet and public auctions over the past two months.
The exercise intended to demonstrate that the scores of lost or stolen laptops that wind up at auction every day have hard drives with little or no security, giving identity thieves and fraudsters easy access to lucrative data.
What it did not expect to find was a cache of corporate laptops too that were as easy to crack as grandma's PC.
In all, the firm's technicians were able to pull sensitive details from 70 of the 100 machines it bought.
In one case, it obtained a particularly vulnerable hard drive from online auction site eBay that apparently once belonged to one of Europe's largest insurance companies.
I've worked for a lot of companies that simply do not re-sell their old systems. They have them archived in a secure part of a building or warehouse for a set number of years, then they're destroyed. I'm not sure this is entirely necessary, but its certainly the most effective way of making sure secure data does not get sold along with an old system.