Bruce Schneier has linked to yet another study that shows that people don't securely delete data from drives before selling them. This group purchased 111 supposedly clean hard drives and recovered a lot of sensitive information including "national insurance numbers, evidence of a married woman’s affair and detailed biographical information about children." I think the major issue is that your common guy thinks that formatting the drive is the solution to erase data, and anything more sophisticated than that is too difficult or expensive. Here I'll show you how to easily shred a drive using free Open Source tools.

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