Q: What are Garfinkel and Shelat's three hypothesis for why there are so many cases of unintended disclosure and what are some recommendations they give to prevent these in the future? (kmartinez)

A1: 1. These types of disclosure are rare.
2. These events happen so often they are not newsworthy.
3. People are generally not looking for confidential information.
(Bucy, 310)
Some Recommendations include: sanitizing through erasing, overwriting, or taxonomy. Using degaussers, disintegrating, or incinerating.(Bucy, 312) (jstanley)

A2: 1.these types of discloure are rare
2. these events happen so often they are not newsworthy
3. people are generally not looking for confidential information.
As mentioned above the recommendations deal with sanitizing hard drives or basically any techniques altering date or erasing data. (ijoshi)

Q: What are some the techniques mentioned for sanitizing hard drives? Why is this so important to do? (ijoshi)

A1: Some of the inadequate methods of sanitizing hard drives are simply erasing via the delete button, putting in the recycling bin, or by removing from the hard drive. Also overwriting, although approved by the government, is still not fully effective. One recommendation is to "equip a disk drive with a cryptographic subsystem that automatically encrypts every disk block when the block is written, and decrypts the block when it is read back" (Busy, 317). He also suggests that operating systems come with a background process that erases sectors that are not currently in use (Bucy, 317). These are so important because sensitive information such as medical, financial, or social information could be extracted from old hard drives. All of which could be exploited by people with the intent to use the information for illegal acts. (kmartinez)

A: Another way to overwite a hard disk is to fill every adressable block with ASII NUL bytes (zeroes) (Pg. 312). (cells)

Q: When information is "erased" from a hardrive, where does it actually go and how can it be retrieved? (cellis)

A: The information does not go anywhere, rather the tag telling the computer where the information is is erased. The information is still there, but the computer does not know where the information is stored. There are several programs that can be used to find and restore "deleted" information. (murban)


Q: Even though there are many ways to properly sanitize a hard drive, why are so many being sold or given away with important information still on them? (murban)

A: