Events — Colloquia & Seminars
Used Disk Drives
Speaker: Simson Garfinkel, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT
Date: Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Talk: 12:00 PM, 366 West Village H
Abstract
Between 1998 and 2002, Simson Garfinkel purchased 200 used hard drives on eBay. Analyzing these hard drives with a variety of tools, he found a treasure trove of personal and business confidential information; information he should never have seen.
In this talk, Garfinkel will discuss the information he found and why it was findable. He'll give a brief survey of how file-sytems lay information on the hard drive, how and when that information is overwritten, and what tools you can use to perform forensic analysis and properly sanitize media. Finally, he'll show how the results of this research are applicable to digital cameras, flash memory, MP3 players, Palm Pilots, and a wide variety of other systems
Brief Biography
See Simson's online biography.