Terrifying HDD I Found in the Dumpster
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- Опубліковано 11 лют 2025
- Throw a buck in the hat: / schvabek
Recently I've pulled out this HDD out of my local dumpster. Join me as we explore the scary reality of the lack of cyber security some people have.
To everybody watching and getting ready to write a comment: I’ve made a follow up video explaining a couple of things. I’ve talked to the guy. You might want to watch that before commenting. Cheers!
Saw your follow up video so I watched this one. Honestly you crossed a line here that you shouldn’t have. Don’t go digging around people’s stuff on camera (even if it is blurred) it is trashy.
😎🎸
@@CybersecPat I agree. I would have shown finding it and then saying that it had personal info on it and left it at that. To go through everything on camera is a bit gross to be honest. There was no need for it at all.
Man Bun Alert
you should of sent it back to him with a note saying please discard of this the right way DAN or whatever his name is lol
I definitely would have emailed him from his own gmail. Told him I was him from the future and only he could prevent the coming apocalypse.
😂
Sounds like something James Veitch would do!!! 😂 OH WAIT!!! HE DID!!! Sorta.
😆😆😆😆🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Sounds like that episode from The Office with the fax
🤣
That guy has no idea how lucky is that the right person found his hard drive. The world needs more people like you.
Do you know Jesus Christ can set you free from sins and save you from hell today
Jesus Christ is the only hope in this world no other gods will lead you to heaven
There is no security or hope with out Jesus Christ in this world come and repent of all sins today
Today is the day of salvation come to the loving savior Today repent and do not go to hell
Come to Jesus Christ today
Jesus Christ is only way to heaven
Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void
Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today
Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today
Romans 6.23
For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
John 3:16-21
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
Mark 1.15
15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
2 Peter 3:9
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Hebrews 11:6
6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Jesus
You think he's the right person after h logged into his accounts? I have some reservations about that.
@@curiousnomadic If he did anything nefarious I doubt he would be blasting it out on social media.
If he was a right guy, he will formated the HDD and dont look on personal data.
@@gigadisk Not unless the hard drive held illegal content. Then he would have had to report it to the authorities.
the title made me think it had child p*rn or something like that on it.
Yeah, the title is kinda sketchy, but you have to agree this is also pretty bad.
Same lol
Well I don’t keep sensitive data such as passwords on the drives. As for this drive, did you ever think this came from a stolen computer? The other individual could have gleaned all of this info and then dumped the drive. It’s in your hands now, you showcased it on your channel and now you could be considered the criminal who may have stolen the computer this drive was in. In cases like this, wipe the drive before showcasing it. It will keep you safer from some gestapo style police force who will blame the first person who found the drive. It would be an innocent person in jail for someone else’s crime.
@ well it’s a good thing a have a ton of footage, documenting how I found this thing lol. Also, if they do nail me for this, it’s going to make for an interesting series of videos 😂 no but fr I don’t think you have to worry about that. Also, of course I’ll wipe the drive. I’ll probably use it for one of my retro projects.
Yeah, that's the point, they call it "something-baiting", something like that. Where they try to make out a video full of big fat nothing is something exciting, but actually, it isn't. This is "terrifying" like a cordless drill is terrifying when you *don't* use it in any sorts of masscres.
Throwing your hard drive with all your data is dumb as hell, either forget about it in some random drawer or absolutely destroy that thing
Delete the contents and sell it if you want to get rid of a hard drive.
@MASTERCRAFTER23
no, that data can be recovered. NOTHING is truly deleted on a hard drive, nor SSD.
(JEEZ youtube, let me ping someone when replying...)
@@itszedrealthat's not at all true, zeroing a drive 2-3 times is certainly gonna remove any trace of old data from it
@itszedreal Even after several reformats on a disk drive data is still retrievable, best to just disassemble it and destroy it.
@@itszedreal go in the 3 dots on the side of the commennt to reply, also had the same problem recently because before i just clicked in the comment and it would already reply
"Oh noooooo, oh no no nooooo, I have access to his banking information. Oh noooooo!" proceeds to transfer money from his account
Google find my device will get you caught
Banks usually force you to use some kind of 2FA for online banking.
@@tuxrandom yup. I have to enter my password, 2FA code, confirm with fingerprint, confirm transfer, confirm fingerprint and confirm transfer again before anything happens. If i enter my password or pin wrong 3 times, my online banking is completely blocked and i have to go to a physical location of my bank and ask them to unlock and let me change my password/pin.
@@tuxrandom My credit union doesn't. All I need to do is click on the login fields and select the suggested saved username and password. I could probably set up some kind of 2FA, but I haven't.
@ Okay, sounds like forced 2FA might be something specific to where I live. I haven't heard of a bank making it optional here. But then again, my country has very strict laws when it comes to financial stuff.
I am also a long time dumpster diver and tag sale fan, and I have found at least a couple of dozen hard drives over the years. A large proportion of them have much sensitive information on them... like porn, or histories of porn, and account information, personal emails and letters, and much, much more. One town computer had one of the secretaries personal letters with banks and collection agencies, pleading desperately to not lose her house to foreclosure. On the surface, this woman projected an image of middle class security... Nice home, nice car, well dressed... and so on, many secrets on all those drives.
I am an honest person and would never use any of it for any purpose, of course. And one time, after buying an old computer with over 1,000 photos in it, I burned them to a CD-Rom (this was 15 years ago), and tried to find the family to get them back to them... but the trail was cold. The seller had found the computer on the side of the road, and I could not find the people in the pictures. The name didn't come up anywhere (yes, odd, but some people just don't leave a trail, especially moreso 15 years ago).
Now an interesting thing... when my mother died in '17, her companion erased her email from her accounts, stole her computers... even tore many pages out of her diary. When he died, the daughter gave me permission to take anything I wanted from her house... after her and her cousins did, of course. Well there were about five hard drives in all his equipment, and I was able to recover much family infromation for the daughter... pictures and videos she had never seen, of her mother, aunt, and so on.
But he had this one wastebasket that had, at the bottom, the parts of three hard drives. He had meticulously disassembled them, then smashed the disks inside with a hammer. The rotor bearings with shards of disk, and the bent up housings, were all that were left. Even the disk shards were gone... he probably burned or buried them, or trashed them maybe.
So I often wonder what the heck he was hiding on there! He did start a war with the Estate, claiming my mother meant to give him her house if she died, and claimed the will was forged, and all that. My suspicion is that he wanted to destroy any evidence to the contrary, but I will never know.
For anyone interested, one more "old hard drive" story: My father was throwing out tons of stuff about a dozen years ago. In it was my nephew's old IBM PCII. So I took out his hard drive to save it for him... I have a giant bin of like 30 hard drives... and one day, when he was like 47, he was telling me that he wanted to build a computer like his old IBM, which he had as a kid while living with his grandpa. Imagine his suprise when I told him I could send him the HARD DRIVE FROM HIS ACTUAL COMPUTER! When he builds that thing... he is collecting parts... it will fire up with all the games, data, everything, from over 30 years ago!
That last one was especially wholesome. Thanks for typing all that!! Fun read.
Cool
nice
The last one will be a monumental moment for your nephew. It's like opening a time capsule.
Also, I'm thinking of shifting courses in college to computers stuffs. What do you think I should study to learn these kinds of things?
(Computer science, computer engineering, IT or ICT, etc.)
This is why I tell family members, especially my nieces and nephews to never just throw out their old laptops.
whenever you find a laptop/phone/pc in trash with all components in place there's a 90% chance that all data is still there. I found a laptop at home that some relative found and took, when I plugged it in to see if it worked it turned out the battery was dead, the graphics barely showed colors correctly but there was still Skype opened in the background and everything would be still logged in if the year was 2012 and not 2020, the whole desktop was covered in files and folders, there were photos, videos, apps, etc. even passwords but by then they were changed or the accounts didn't even exist. That guy was lucky it didn't end up being stolen by someone with bad intents. You have to be really careful about knowing where your data ends up. Also very important, please avoid selling or giving away HDDs or really any digital storage devices because all data is still recoverable after formatting. If you're selling a computer, buy a new drive and keep the previous one, or just destroy it, shatter HDD disc platters, break SSD memory chips in half or just get it disposed off properly. This is no joke. There are people who target this.
@@CreeplayEU take out the drives and actually go wild with a hammer. I am being serious lol. The pointy bit of the hammer.
If I have to throw an old machine I always remove the drives first and salvage all the data I can. If I give it away I wipe it and do a clean reinstall first.
What I do in such a case is do a drive wipe and a base reload of windows so the laptop can be reused by someone. (full data wipe 1st)
I never throw away a hard drive, even if it's inoperative. I have hard drives still in my possession from the 1990s.
The reason why the first computer didn't boot the drive is because it was a UEFI install of Windows, and that old computer was BIOS only. You had to run the repair on the new computer so that recovery could install the UEFI boot variables in the firmware.
gadfly
Exactly. There is also a potential where an install was performed as ATA [drive controller setting] but the computer is set to AHCI or the other way around. In this case you're right. Legacy/UEFI has to do with bios handoff mode which began with Win 8 secure boot. I turn secure boot off and put it in "legacy" mode because even a Win install image downloaded directly from Micro$oft that has the UEFI files, to computer won't see the Win setup boot flash drive from the BBS screen, I have to into the bios and turn it to legacy for the BBS to see it anyway. Ason then Hirens boot flash drive will be seen too by the BBS if repairs are needed.
[BBS = Bios Boot Screen]
NERD :~)
If it's running Win11 it won't work on any other piece of hardware than the one it came from. That's why smartboot and TCP chips are mandatory now.
@@dwindle The two technologies are safeboot and TPM, but unfortunately not only are you wrong about those, you're also wrong about Win11 only booting on the hardware it was installed on.
When I was younger my dad and I found a PC at the curb and powered it on. Still had personal photos, tax documents... He made sure to tell me to NEVER get rid of a computer without deleting stuff first. A few months ago I bought a macbook at an estate sale: same story. Terrifying to know what the wrong people could do with it.
sadly this is a common thing. I remember curb picking PC's on more than one occasion as a teen and then finding the owner's sensitive data on it (tax info, and letters written out to others.) If my memory serves me well, I think one PC I had found back then (in the early 00s) looked like it was used by someone who had prepared tax documents for others with some MS-DOS program.
People should try to know more about basic PC components, like you wouldn't have a problem like this if you took out the HDD and either stored it for making a backup later or formatting it clean to be reused or sold as secondhand, assuming its still good
That's why encrypted drives are a thing, but they have their own disadvantages: not only are they a tad slower (basically only important on old hardware), but also if you lose the password you're screwed. There's no recovering that data unless you backed it up somewhere, which in turn brings us back to the question of whether or not to encrypt.
i think they upgraded to an ssd and cloned the system but forgot to wipe the old hdd
I don’t know man. Just, don’t know 😂
Yea, i had the same thought too
Yeah, I'm sure you're right. Pretty dumb not wiping the drive before tossing it.
@@Cyba_ITPeople sell computers, smartphones, consoles etc all the time without wiping them or even logging out of online accounts.
Probably, if not, it doesn't make any sense.
Some people have no awareness of personal security, frankly the owner of the HDD is very lucky that it was you that found it.
Good vid.
Thanks man ❤️
Unless he wasn't the first one that found it and it was duplicated.Nonsense you say? Remember how they framed Hunter Biden ? Ask Lev Parnas he testified to that effect
@@schvabek well if i were you i would just immediately sign out of that account
It's because of today's culture, most people don't give a crap where their data is because well, everybody just takes it all the time.
@ Got TWO notices of Data Breach this week
Seems millions of HealthCare Data files were stolen from two HealthCare Data Centers.What's worse is it took them EIGHT months to alert me.
Really, the horse has left the barn,kids.
At my old job, we always drilled holes in old hard drives because the company had no budget to send them to a recycler. I always make sure to encrypt all of my drives just in case.
Better than just leaving them for somebody to find, that’s for sure.
dumb and dangerous to do that, they can be took apart with a few torx screw drivers in less then 5min, and the platters separated from the chassis, you can then take the 2 powerful magnets that are inside them and apply them to the metal platters fully erasing them if your really paranoid.
We crush the spindle in a hydraulic press. It causes the platters to completely shatter into bits.
ya would definetly been bad for a company if trade secrets or anthing like that leaked, and could actually cause alot of problem for the company if say inside information came into hands of someone.
i did a service call for a major Fortune 50 company in their R&D division..I determined the HDD was bad..they had back ups of the data of course..the security guy asked if I wanted to take the HDD with me i said sure i assumed he would wipe it.. ..so he took it and ran it through a commercial metal shredder and handed me a bucket containing what was left of the HDD..1 inch square pieces ..well that made sure the data was safe hahaha.
I would definitely contact the guy. I found a wallet on the sidewalk once. Full of cash, driver’s license, credit cards, the works. Turns out the dude lived a couple houses down from me one street over. He was ecstatic he got his wallet back with everything inside. When I walked up to his house I could hear drawers opening and banging closed. I think he was frantically trying to remember where he left his wallet.
Another possibility is the computer was stolen and parts of it thrown away by the thief. The legit owner may not be aware of the data breech. Many people don't use a boot up password!
Honestly bootup passwords are useless on windows. There are so many ways to either change the password or bypass it. Encrypt your drive id you care about it.
I used to drive down the alley behind homes in more affluent neighborhoods the day before the first trash day after Christmas. Tons of excellent working computers were to be found.
Thanks for the idea! Beginning of the year extra funds. I'll clean them up and sell them. Only a few weeks to go!
Just wait until the windows 10 EOL. There will be much more "e-waste" for the taking.
1:34 that’s not from a server, that’s from a Dell desktop! I recognize those blue hard drive rails, I saw some in an XPS 420 a friend gave me
I’ve seen it in older Dell Inspiron desktop (2nd and 3rd gen Intel) as well
Hey, thanks for the info, yeah, people have informed me of that
It's the drive cage from an Optiplex 3020 SFF.
@@bradbrown6034 Came here to say this. Beat me to it.
Yep.... as others have stated that caddy came from a Dell.
Some people really don't give a shit. I had a friend give me a computer that was like this: no password on the OS, bunch of important looking files, and lord knows what was in the browsers. This thing was just sitting in her car port outside her house and when I told her someone could've just walked away with it and been logged into all her shit, she just said "okay?" and looked at me like I was stupid.
That is such a common answer today (and always)
if youre going to show data PLEASE do not use a traditional blur or pixelate to obscure fonted information. In the field of data recovery we know exactly how to pull data because blurs and pixelations are algorithmic and its easy to figure out your algorithm, combine that with knowing what information looks like in a given font, and a lot of this person's user data is actually available to bad actors in this video. Use black redaction boxes or specialized destructive filters for this (I would stick to the boxes)
Stop talking. That’s not possible.
@@KayhoticGames he probably seen that one Twitter thread. It’s not impossible just difficult. You’d have to know what kind of blur and what amount someone did in order to reverse engineer it.
zabranjena Ljubav😂😂😂😂
@@knight808. I don’t use twitter. No idea what thread you’re talking about. And yes, you do need to know the filtering algorithm(s) (in some cases layering two blurs / pixelates upon each other is still recoverable) and the basic font used (very easy to figure out when you know the application), but most of the time the blur used is easy to figure out, especially when a known logo is present, because people generally use the ones cooked into their editing software, which really isn’t hard at all to run through. There ARE filters that are destructive to the information as I mentioned, but OP did not use one of these, I can recover text from this video (but I’m not publishing it.) and another commenter mentioned it too.
@@clankplusm bro stop lying. you cannot recover the text from this video
Throwing a hard drive away is like throwing away your wallet and an unlocked phone.
The only way I toss them is after they have been absolutely destroyed with pieces going out on separate garbage days.
No good deed goes unpunished as they say. Just wipe the drive clean.
@@jklax Of course I will. I’ll probably use it in one of my older builds that needs a HDD.
@@schvabek You should probably contact the man since you have his phone number and e-mail. The fact that you have this HDD, know who it belongs to, and want to keep it, could get you in trouble.
Don’t contact the guy, it proves that you have obtained and used information that doesn’t belong to you. Just format it and pretend it never happened.
Don't just 'wipe' the drive in a quick format like you would your own drive. Use something like BleachBit and get ANY data off there. Take no chances with used persistent storage.
@@schvabek The takeaway point for me, from the OP here, is more about NOT contacting the guy, _"No_ _good_ _deed_ _goes_ _unpunished"._ Because that saying is unfortunately all too true.
So you do TWO things, to protect yourself AND protect him. You DON'T contact him AND you DO erase his disk.
If you contact him, he may feel vulnerable, violated and angry, even though this is exposure is his fault. There's no need for you to assume any risk from his ignorance.
Erase and move on.
Man the title had me sweating because some other guy made a video about a hp z mini pc thing with lots of ILLEGAL stuff on it, however this is also horrible, for the previous owner at least, so glad there are still people who actually care, unlike the person who threw the drive before wiping it fully.
@@Alexei1727 Yeah, I know the title is a bit clickbaity, but it really is terrifying. Still stumped man.
Do you still remeber the vid title cuz i wana see the vid
tbf there are tools used to sail the sea on there
@@Inteli7_7700k I believe it's "This computer could have gotten me in trouble!! HP Z2 Mini G3!!" by DLM tech garage
Terrifying? Nah this is just clickbait. People dump stuff like this all the time without wiping.
Terrifying is like when a tiger is chasing you or when you fall off a cliff. This is just everyday dumb stuff that usually doesn't lead to negative consequences.
Clickbait makes the internet a worse place dude. Don't.
Whether it's working or not, before I throw away a hard drive, I give it several pokes with the carbide bit of my power drill. Several perforations with a 1/4" to 3/8" bit is generally enough to make the platters unrecoverable.
good practice.
Carbide is a tad overkill, no? My HSS should work just fine unless this is secretly tool steel or something inside.
I open it, disassemble it, and keep the magnets witch are quite powerful. Oh yeah, and break the platters.🔨
I'm too lazy I just shoot it with my 45 in the backyard. And Not too late in the evening as to annoy or worry my neighbors. I once found a Dell computer at a thrift store That was loaded with information. Funny thing was it was a cop and he had a text file with all this passwords and had been illegally downloading music through LimeWire if you guys remember that So he had a ton of viruses like hundreds of them. After I removed all the viruses and the computer booted up properly I had access to his checking accounts everything. Of course I didn't do anything with the information I deleted everything but he was in real trouble financially with $11,000 in credit card debt and his wife was a nurse and apparently they had about $45 in their checking account with overdraw fees and other stuff. I had that computer for a few years I bought it for when my son visited when he was 15. And then I gave it away
Just overwrite the entire disk, there is no need to create e-waste.
13:33 I was _so_ expecting a vpn sponsorship here, glad there wasn't one
12:25 it’s only bad if you do something bad with it. Just log out and form out the hard drive.
It's format not "form out" btw but yes your right
He probably didnt realise that the drive was recoverable, probably throw it away thinking the drive was dead, bit odd finding windows 11 on spinning rust, probably upgraded to ssd or m.2.
Exactly. One of the reasons I made this video. Perhaps it saves someone from getting into serious trouble
mine would be destroy long before it get to the trash bin.. the magnets so damn useful.
"He probably didnt realise that the drive was recoverable": Or his partner threw the drive away, without his consent.
More likely someone else threw it away. I mean, who throws away a laptop, it's even illegal to dispose of electronics like that. Plus, the finder should have contacted the original owner (anonymously) and informed him to change his passwords and what not. I believe even sifting through his email may have been illegal (breaching privacy of mail communications), so he should not reveal his identity while warning him. The thing is, since this UA-cam channel is public, he could find out anyway. Therefore stupid move to brag about it on UA-cam as well.
your windows 11 wouldnt boot in the old machine since the machine doesnt support efi boot
Yep
Good point - probably no functional MBR boot code on that HDD, so it might have gone into an infinite loop or simply executed random garbage until it crashed (invalid opcode or something).
My first though was to do with the SATA controller IDE/Native/AHCI mode, but it that case it might actually get through the bootloader and throw up an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE bugcheck.
@@schvabek you can boot to clover bootloader (it was generally used for hackintoshing) on an old bios system and use clover to boot efi stuff on gpt drives as a workaround.
yea windows 11 doesn't have mbr boot
I also found an old imac with the entire life of a woman. Email pictures of her and her girlfiend, downloaded movies and mucic. The mac wasn't even password protected. Luckily for her I found that and wiped everything.
As I’ve said in some previous comments, it’s super common for me to find that stuff, since I go through many old computers. But most of them are pre-internet/social media era, and I kinda don’t blame those people for not wiping the HDD, since they really had no concept of their data being leaked “out there”. But this, holy crap. Pretty insane.
"Oh, no... no no no no..."
*opens popcorn*
"Oh, f-ck, nooooo"
*sips drink*
"NOOOOO..."
*lights cigar*
Most people don’t realize that many types of photocopiers contain some sort of memory drive device, especially business copiers.
....
Do you know Jesus Christ can set you free from sins and save you from hell today
Jesus Christ is the only hope in this world no other gods will lead you to heaven
There is no security or hope with out Jesus Christ in this world come and repent of all sins today
Today is the day of salvation come to the loving savior Today repent and do not go to hell
Come to Jesus Christ today
Jesus Christ is only way to heaven
Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void
Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today
Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today
Romans 6.23
For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
John 3:16-21
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
Mark 1.15
15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
2 Peter 3:9
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Hebrews 11:6
6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Jesus
The REALLY terrifying part is that our boy's drive there has a shortcut for a Faculty of Organization and Informatics email account.
That's a drive of a trained IT professional with a possible IT degree.
With possible interest into Croatian daytime soap operas. Which is even more terrifying. Could be ironic though.
The use of Winamp and WinRAR and Open Office (let alone QBT) made me assume that this is someone who's 40+ YO (likely 37-60) who was or is a bit of a techie.
Yeah many people just don't care about nothing nowadays, sadly.
That doesn't mean he's really a professional. It only means he's going to university. Anyone of 10,000s do have such an email account, it's nothing special.
But if so, the higher the degree, sometimes people use less effort in security. I mean even governments make the simplest mistakes, don't tell the ordinary secretary workers to not click email attachments and things like that, don't harden their PCs, don't restrict USB stick use and so on. They even use Skype and whatever they personally install on such PCs, which is a high risk, circumventing any NAT firewall. I mean personal programs and data never should be on such office PCs, but nearly noone cares. They don't use two separate PCs for that to save time.
People just don't care when security costs too much. Politicians and institutes get millions and billions for many different senseless things, nepotism is all around in every country, but for security they pay nearly nothing. Some institutes were "hacked" by interns who spread some USB sticks with bad content in offices which everyone had access over years, at least 3 times in a row in some years here. Everyone talks about security, but noone really takes care. So they don't even learn and invest more into security after the 2nd data breach *face palm*. Meanwhile they tell us about bad hackers every now and then in the news, but the reality is, that workers click on email attachments and activate automated botnets. That's nothing to do with hacking. Hacking costs true money and time and is quite rarely used.
What I've seen nowadays is that people with degrees memorize things for the theoretical exams (but have no practical knowledge or use, no time for that), then write theis exams and forget the content after two weeks while writing the next exams, like most students do. In the end more people who can remember things easily get the good grades (but don't know the backgrounds), not people with real knowledge. Knowledge takes time, many years to develop.
People like us geeks who invest free time for years or decades know much more about security like so-called IT professionals.
I mean it's a whole industry of Microsoft crap around, which is completely unecessary.
All the so-called "Microsoft Certified Professionals", Cisco certificate blabla and similar people know nothing about real use security, they only follow the rules which Gates and others made to create money for them, sell the stuff they want people to buy. Does anyone notice how many security flaws Cisco/Microsoft have, how many page faults?
Compared to those who program in their free time and know what they do, use Linux, f.e. which has much less page faults in the source codes.
(It's one reason why MS bought github ofc., the biggest free source code collection worldwide, ideas they can use and sell later).
That's the truth about those "IT professionals". The real geeks are hidden or work for governments or in the private sector, but don't need such so-called IT degrees.
They don't fix security flaws in Edge, f.e., but only blackbox new found memory faults. Time costs more and security isn't worth it. It's even worth for them to not fix many CVEs in time, so they can sell their new products which they claim to be better.
The trained "IT people" follow rules, but they don't think outside of the box, they don't have time for that.
Also in other university subjects, they don't want creative people which really invent new stuff (w/o prof./dr. using the students ideas for themselves), but people who follow the rules. So it's quite rare that people really invent new things in universities, but instead mostly copy already known ideas.
At least nowadays that's common. 30 years ago it was a different story maybe. But back then the world was easier, less crap in the IT world, less complexity, less bloatware.
I mean nowadays the antivir industry create malware just to sell 0day fixes every time. Magic magic.
How many resources we could save w/o using Windows and all those crap alone...man I wish we could re-live the 90s. More quality, less quantity.
People nowadays grow up with 4+ core CPUs, but know nearly no basics. They don't know what sectors are and things like that.
Most hardware is so cheap nowadays that people don't value anything but their new GPU, lol.
One paradoxon: While everyone tends to speak about security, most people are used to use Google, FB, MS, Apple and so on. People use credit cards on daily base, buy online w/o thinking about it.
Cookies are everywhere, Bluetooth 5 is spying on nearly anyone more than GPS is (GPS is obsolete I think), because nearly anyone uses BT headphones.
Security doesn't count anymore, tbh. It's even hard to be offline, nearly impossible. You can't even pay with paper / coin bills in some countries anymore, people are totally controlled.
In fairness, if I found that somebody had installed Windows 11 on my hardware, I'd probably throw it away.
Real
lol a lot of hate for win 11 in the comments 😂😂 🤟🤟❤️❤️
one of microsofts biggest failures
@@stevemanlp well then I won’t be in a hurry to actually use it on any of my systems
@@schvabek i actually prefer ubuntu over windows 11 even (my pain pc has windows 10 tho)
I bought an old Toshiba laptop a while back, still had it's hard drive in it and yes, when I looked it had all the original owners details on there - he was a doctor of some kind and there were a lot of old health related documents of hundreds of his patients still accessible, plus all his internet history and log ins, and then I checked his pictures directory and it was full of pornography, of course. And it just kept getting worse, there were hundreds of pictures of his wife or girlfriend (you can guess what sort of pictures I'm talking about here) plus weirdly lots of pornographic images of ladies with other ladies heads badly composited into the pictures - and then it became obvious these 'heads' were actually people he knew, there were some pictures of what looked like parties and gatherings and you guessed it, that was the source of the 'heads'. It was pretty disturbing, frankly. I shredded the contents of course. Some people just haven't a clue when it comes to their data and how to dispose of their old hard drives.
Yikes, that’s pretty bad. I’ve found personal files plenty of times, since I mess around with old computers so much, but this (a new installation with passwords and login info) is a first for me
HAHA IS ALL MOST ON EVERY COMPUTER ...*
(YOURS TO HAVE STUFF ON)
DONT PLAY JESUS
Wanted to ask advice - we have some local repair places - and I've seen some online ones you can ship them out too. Any recommendations? Better to bring local? I also had concerns about wiping the laptops too - this video def showed the dangers in NOT doing that!! Thank you for this!!
Hey, I’ve just noticed that the previous comment I left doesn’t really shop up, so I’ll try summing up what I said in the response:
Are you looking for a recycling facility to dispose of large quantities of drives? Are they HDD/SSD? I don’t really see the point in shipping them if you already have a recycling plant nearby. They should do a good job making sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, however, if you’re one of those people who’ll lose sleep over it, as people have said in the comments, physically destroying/smashing the drives once you take them out might be the best solution. But if you have dozens of them, that might be too much of a hassle.
mama courtney watching tech videos?
I love that you are saying, “oh no, this is bad”, while you are rooting though his personal stuff. You could have just not opened anything and wiped the HDD.
He didn't mean himself. He meant what the person left his personal info on there. Damn people are dense....
Edit: I think your YT name needs a changing....
@@charlestannehill7537 Talk about dense, you missed the point entirely. Would you like me to dumb it down for you?
@@ThinkCriticallyNow actually, you missed the point. "This is bad" is referring to what he (this guy) left on the hard drive. But don't take my word for it. Ask him yourself. Highly doubt he's saying what he's doing is bad. Good day.
@@charlestannehill7537 Oh ffs, no shit Sherlock. I'm guessing you're American.
"this is bad" as in "the stuff this person left behind is bad", not "what i'm doing is bad"
Gmail is the gold mine for data. You could change his password for banks or whatever and steal his identity. This is nuts!
I’m still stumped. Can’t help but wondering how many of these unprotected HDDs are out there
nuh, banks have 2fa forced, since the stone age. but lots of other online accounts don't.
@@giornikitop5373 2FA - send a code to the email account. And then I'm in and emptying the account.
@@schvabek i found 2 months ago 3 HDDs on the street
all fully packed with data
i had a guys whole biology and medicne studys one them
private pictures, programs and terabytes of ripped movies, podcasts, music and series
and tons of other stuff in hundreds of folders
i even found out who he was
i found his name in one folder and typed into "search". Due to search i found one of his email adresses and his name
I googled him and found out that hes the CEO of a big medical company
i said i found his HDDs and he can have them back. But if he doesnt want them, i delete the data and keep them for my use.
i wrote him multiple mails and after a couple days he responded. He didnt want them back, he simply said i can keep them
he said that he put them on the street for the trash company got his old stuff and he didnt knew that there was still data on them...
i was baffled how a CEO of such a company can be so careless with his data
not only was there tons of personal stuff, but if police found it, they could have charged him with a ton of stuff due to the ripped stuff which filled the drives
sadly all other drives i found in the past where either broken or empty. I always hope to find a bitcoin wallet haha.
@@schvabek @schvabek i found 2 months ago 3 HDDs on the street
all fully packed with data
i had a guys whole biology and medicne studys one them
private pictures, programs and terabytes of ripped movies, podcasts, music and series
and tons of other stuff in hundreds of folders
i even found out who he was
i found his name in one folder and typed into "search". Due to search i found one of his email adresses and his name
I googled him and found out that hes the CEO of a big medical company
i said i found his HDDs and he can have them back. But if he doesnt want them, i delete the data and keep them for my use.
i wrote him multiple mails and after a couple days he responded. He didnt want them back, he simply said i can keep them
he said that he put them on the street for the trash company got his old stuff and he didnt knew that there was still data on them...
i was baffled how a CEO of such a company can be so careless with his data
not only was there tons of personal stuff, but if police found it, they could have charged him with a ton of stuff due to the ripped stuff which filled the drives
sadly all other drives i found in the past where either broken or empty. I always hope to find a bitcoin wallet haha.
Whoever this was that had this drive propably got a scare. He almost definitely got notifications about new device logins
Well, I sure hope so 😂
Not necessarily. Many users that use GMAIL will have a prompt that they answer as to whether or not to prompt for two factor on that device; and most will tick the box to not be bothered again. I'd give it a 99% chance that the original owner got ZERO notifications.
@@MrPir84free yeah I don't think they would have got a notication as it would have been registered as a trusted device, however facebook might have noticed it was a new location, maybe.
Oh my goodness, this was literally an eye opening PSA, if there ever was one! Thank goodness this hard drive inadvertently landed in the hands of someone genuine and trustworthy- a blessing for the original owner of that hard drive.
You've definitely had some INSANE experiences with computer stuff lately!!! 😱
@@thethriftyfawn Man I don’t even know what to say. I was stumped, I’m still shaky just thinking about it. And who knows how many people just carelessly throw these things out without even thinking about what could happen. Yikes.
@schvabek You're doing phenomenal work here bro, for the entire WORLD 🩷
@@schvabek There are some statistics about it, MIT has found that 78% of "wiped" harddrives still have data and I would say from just personal experiences that 50% (thats a like nice estimate, real estimates are 30%) of discarded harddrives weren't wiped
Luckily my dad works with computers as a job so when I was a kid he came home with like a stack of hard drives and essentially said "wanna smash em?"
@@zapx1239 I bet that statistic isn’t too far off. SSD’s are a bit safer (given the way the data is stored on them), but yeah, HDD’s… if it’s something crucial, just smash em.
@@schvabek Yeah it was data from a university, probably containing passwords and similar.
I found these kind of HDD's before. I always took the opportunity to contact the owner and educate them on security.
"Ooo thats bad" goes even further into his personal information
About why it wouldn't boot on the original computer, if I had to guess, it's simply because it's old, so it's still using the old-school BIOS / MBR booting process, while Windows 11 requires an UEFI / GPT system. Even if it wasn't the case, Windows 11 isn't actually compatible with Core 2 anymore, like, at all, it doesn't even boot because it requires CPU instructions that first appeared in Core i 2nd generation (don't quote me on the exact generation).
Also, ladies and gentlemen, that is why Microsoft now forces BitLocker on new installation of Windows, just like Apple uses their T2 chip to encrypt, so people can't leak their ENTIRE LIFE because they couldn't be bothered to format or destroy a drive (not that a regular format is secure, but at least, it's SOMETHING).
@@MrCed122 yeah, that figures. Like I said, I’m not familiar with windows 11 at all lol. And yeah, wiping you HDD usually still isn’t enough, but it’s a far cry better than this.
Win11 doesn't actually need uefi/gpt, my pc has MBR currently but win11 works.
@@TheZorinUserBut if the drive uses the GPT partition format like the overwhelming majority of Windows 11 installs do then a Windows XP era PC wont be able to recognize it as bootable since it can't understand GPT only MBR.
yeah, have fun when your windows 11 breaks after some idiotic update from microsoft and you can't access any data on your encrypted disc
@@istvandjumber6474Exactly!!!.
Glad people like you exist who are still making calm tech videos, nowadays everything is too intense and overedited.
Love your videos man
Thanks so much. Love you man ❤️
YESSSS and so many of them try to pretend to be "calm" when its still an overedited mess just with a soft voice
@ I also feel that way, and I’m glad my audience appreciates the way I make my videos ❤️
That or making video about computer related topic that the youtuber has no idea about it.
You joined UA-cam one week ago?
this is a really good example of why you should always overwrite a drive when your getting rid of it. formatting can still be recovered, overwriting or zeroing it out is a much cleaner option
@@T3chIdiot Especially HDD. Modern SSD’s are much harder to recover data from if it’s been wiped, just because how it’s stored on there.
even better - I "overwrite" the data with a hammer. a drill also works well.
Bootin up a Linux recovery disk and then using the dd command to write random data to the drive multiple times is a good way to ensure that nothing is going to get recovered from it. Then after you are done you can then use the command to write zeros onto it.
Why would you be scared and shaken about having someone else's personal information... It's not like they have yours...
??
it just feels wrong having something that isn't yours, you don't know who this person is and the possibility on what they would do if they found out thay you were looking into their stuff. fortunately, it seems like the video uploader wasn't going to do anything bad with it.
@@shizune_ yeah it feels wrong that's when you just destroy the drive or at least sign out. it'd make someone feel guilty for a brief moment but it's not a traumatic experience.
idk why the uploader felt that it was "terrifying" and "disturbing" like what...
I’m with you brother! Last week, I found a wallet with over $400. cash and no ID. It did have a Chase credit card with a name on it so I took it to the bank and asked them to return it to their depositor. It’s good to do the right thing!
And theres people out there who threw out HD with bitcoin wallets worth like a billion dollars now
Most likely, yeah.
14:19 yeah contact him ! Tell him what you find. I think he'll understand
I’ll have to think about that man…
@@schvabekYou're a good man for knowing that you could, but choose not to ruin someone.
Jeez, a lot of angry comments here 😬😂 People saying that I’m a criminal and stuff, damn. And even though those people will most likely not read this (or watch the follow up video I’ll likely make), I’d just like to say a few things.
First thing, the drive is of course wiped. As to what to do regarding the owner, I’ll have to think about that. You never know how a person might react, even if you have best intentions. I’m mainly curious about the laptop (perhaps it belonged to him, along with the HDD).
Why did you go through this guy’s stuff? Well, I was really hoping that login info was outdated or that I wouldn’t be able to login for some other security reason. The only way to find out was to actually try it. And everything I did, I did with good intentions, but I guess some people took it the wrong way. Apart from login in, I didn’t go through any of the guy’s stuff. The only thing I could tell was that he had a bunch of PayPal email just by looking at the subject.
And if you see me as some sort of a villain, well… good 😂 Because there are people out there who are out to get your data. Which again brings me to the point of this video, which is - don’t throw away your HDD’s. Or if you do, just at least wipe them first (even though that’s not enough in many cases).
Love you all ❤
All good, you're not evil, and definitely think things over. Maybe even wait to see if the owner contacts YOU, and go from there. Looking forward to the follow up part 2 version! 😊
I would have gone through his stuff on the HDD as well. I don't care what I find nor would I do anything with it. It just sates my curiosity. I also like seeing how disorganized and messy people store their files. If you don't want your data looked at, wipe the drive before tossing it. It's also the reason I don't throw out old HDDs. I have then shredded, even after a wipe.
People are stupid. In most states, and probably yours (if you're even in the States) stuff in dumpsters is free game-correct me here if I'm wrong-but you're not stealing-it's trash.
@@JamesHutton-l7s Excellent point! If it's at the curb or in the trash, it's been discarded and no longer belongs to the person.
You're fine imo.
I drill a hole in any hard drive i throw away. This guy was being totally reckless. I've never seen anyone know about VLC and winamp and not know better than to do this haha.
"Only way to erase hard drive, is hammer." My IT teacher.
That vid shows: never throw ur pc with HDD in it. If u wanna get rid of it. Keep your hard drive.
Maybe it was from a stolen PC, and the hard drive was thrown away to be replaced with a clean brand new one - seems possible since it was so new.
This is just straight up terrifying and seriously dangerous. Before you dump anything storage whether HDD SSD SD card flash drive Always make sure it truely dead by wiping it or break it physically. He just straight out lucky here that this man didn't do anything.
@@nightadmin283 HDD especially, they are super easy to recover files from (if they work).
SSD drives require dedicated software from their manufacturers that will do a complete safe erasure of all data that would lead to an unrecoverable state. SSD's do have finite read write cycles and using an unapproved method of wiping the drive could lead to rendering the drive useless.
13:13 Even if he did get some login notifications he probably wouldn't have immediately connected that to the hard drive he chucked
I guess, I don’t know. Who knows.
Wow! Scary stuff. This lax approach to managing personal data is what makes nightmares. Thanks for posting your video!
That guy is so lucky you got this instead of someone else who could have done many things to ruin his life, i can't believe it wasn't password protected, even my old HHD that i use externally is password protected due to it having being set up with a password. What i would like to know is how he set it up without a password lock, it's almost impossible to do that these days especially with Windows 11.
I like to take hard drives apart when they stop working, the strong magnets are really good for holding key chains.
after I am done with them no data can be recovered, I hope...
Terrifying HDD I Found in the Dumpster what bad things did he find on it?🤔🤔
I also used to dismantle them for magnets and motors. Super fun to play around with as a kid
Awesome, magnetic wiping ensures even magnetic microscopy can't recover the data. For good or bad, 3 letter agencies can put hdd fragments on magnetic microscopy devices and read small fragments of data off it, but reading with such tools would reveal just random magnetic fields after a good degaussing
@@Aera223 with newer drives having narrow sectors it's not that possible like in the past with old drives having wide sectors.
The jitter data on old drives and floppies is much easier to read and use than on new ones.
Those HDDs with shingled sectors make it even more complicated nowadays and in the future.
The real weapon are clouds and data centers storing anything and people offering more and more data voluntarily.
There's Siri, Alexa, Echo...people spy on themselves literally, buying smart microphones.
But also re-programmed smart LEDs can be used as a microphone.
Any mobile phone has a microphone. People don't think about it anymore. Camera data mostly is uninteresting.
In a documentary maybe 10-15 years ago one guy said there's optical splitters in data centers at ISPs which copy the whole internet streams from fibre wires 1:1.
That's where the data comes from and ofc. clouds where people voluntarily upload their data.
There's data centers built in the arctic and oceans meanwhile. We need more energy to store data than heating our flats I guess.
I still wait for the time when the big crash comes and we need to go analog again. Complete infrastructures are unable to exist w/o electricity and data. We couldn't even feed ourselves.
Apple even was told by the FBI to not use a too strong encryption (I think it was max. AES 256 or even 128 back then), so they can crack the AES in not more than 2 weeks (that was like 10-15 years ago already). There's software which can combine 10,000 PCs and/or GPU clusters for distributed computing and you also can hire much faster cloud computing if you have the money for that. Otherwise your single CPU would take 30+ years for that single task, lol.
Nowadays with super powerful GPU clusters the calculation power is much higher even. Unless we all use AES 4096 for documents and have no kind of data leak (which is impossible), any dataset can be cracked in time nowadays, if you have the resources.
Now think about it twice. We were taught about Intel ME, AMT, vPro, backdoors in CPUs running Minix inside of like any Intel CPU from the last 15 years or so.
When your Intel CPU is like shut down (PC shut down, but still on AC standby power) and the LAN port still active, there's like 286 powered part inside of the Intel CPU running Minix to control it via IME/AMT/vPro. Companies can see the BIOS screen remotely on such PCs, f.e.
You can turn IME/AMT off with some tricks, but 99 % of all people would never do that, nearly no normal people knows that, only some 10,000 geeks like us.
Then there's the ESPecter bootkit in EFI System Partition, which effects Windows, Linux and macOS at once! One solution for almost 100 % of all desktop OS worldwide.
It's known to be used since 2012? already.
Any new PC uses EFI. You can hide like 500+ MB content there meanwhile, no normal people will search for malware there. No normal people knows what EFI nor BIOS is, lol.
Think about Spectre, Meltdown and other vulnerabilities, partly built by design.
Think about the 100+ leaked NSA tools which complicated anything about security worldwide since 2016.
Any dumb script kiddie can use those tools (partly) to crack some OS features. Nearly anything which was thought to be kinda secure was obsolete then. But don't think that any OS exchanged any process to make it secure. MS is part of the system ofc., there's contracts and money.
Now think about AES hardware encryption. Wouldn't it be dumb if the manufacturers wouldn't have a backdoor built-in, which instantly gives access instead of cracking AES 512 or even AES 4096? I doubt that there's no backdoor in the new AES CPU instruction sets.
Even full disk encryption would be meaningless for those who have the master keys or backdoor access.
Samsung has backdoors in their modem chips of Smart Phones with Galaxy models, had it since 10 years and more. Read about Replicant OS, which didn't use those modem firmware, but you have a dumb phone then, w/o WLAN/BT/GPS/hardware acceleration, lol.
So you already know that there's an aggregated dataset of any people worldwide.
MS, FB/WA aka Meta, Apple, Google sell your data since decades. Cookies everywhere.
They don't need offline data off HDDs, because 99 % of all people already are online on a daily base.
Read about Win 11 now screen-shoting even? Not only keylogging and mail-indexing, no MS now takes photos off your screen and you accept it by using Win 11.
TPM and T2 chips in PCs and Apple computers have IDs to identify any people worldwide. It's not security for people, but for collecting big data, for MS licensing manufacturers to use Windows on their PCs to make money. Some day the community fears, even Linux must be certified to run on mainboard xy. That's why Secure Boot, WSL2 and such things happened.
EFI didn't make PCs more secure and easy to use, but instead more complicated to use for end users (Most new PCs don't even boot half the old iso / CDs, even with CSM/Legacy on and Secure Boot off and as said, ESP is an open door, also any program can flash firmware into the BIOS from a running OS nowadays).
The methods which we are aware of are at least 10-30 years old tech, don't forget that.
Oh someone uses online MS accounts with Win 11? That's where more data goes to.
The First PC couldnt boot due to Windows using UEFI instead of The Legacy/Bios that motherboard understood, you can tell because the drive will have an EFI partition. Great Video with a very hooking title and thumbnail! Keep it up mate!
Windows 11 also only supports UEFI.
@@white_mask13 thanks so much man, glad you liked it! 🤟 And thanks for the info.
"It's time to look for those Bitcoins hee heeeeee" total got me hahahahaha
Glad I made you smile ❤
This is one of the first tech related videos that I really took the time to sit down and watch in a while.
Pretty interesting to see you try and get the computer working and put the hard drive together. This also speaks as a very important lesson about keeping data secure. Put 2FA on yo shit y'all.
If you're gonna leave a hard drive behind, do it right and destroy the data properly. Articles online will tell you how.
Also, I respect the effort of you going up and down the stairs and digging through all that stuff to make this work. I know that must've been tiring, and i congratulate you for it.
The only thing terrifying is how common this actually is, I come across it all the time aquiring used computers
A useful followup would be a "how to absolutely wipe a HDD" and "How to dispose of your computer"
Thank you for managing this HDD
Running a "shredder" program a few times before reformatting is usually adequate.
I remember sending a cruddy gaming laptop I bought off Walmart to their warranty service and literally had a similar experience with the hard drive _they themselves_ installed in place of the failed one that my system had.
Wow, that’s pretty bad. They could get sued for that imo
I recognize that hdd caddy, it looks like it definitely came out of a dell optiplex 3020, 7020, or 9020 desktop.
Also, coming from someone who’s dug through a recycling center in my town for 2 years, ive seen my whole fare share of data from people who never wipe their hard drives.
Hey, yeah, it is from a dell! Also, yeah, I have a friend who recycles old HW, and yeah, he has A BUNCH of old HDD’s. Curious how many of them have data like this. Crazy.
Try a 990, or 790. Our work just got done replacing hundreds of 990 SFF models, most actually work fine on W10 with an ssd, crazy... Those exact caddies
@@andreivaughn1468Dell used that caddy in tons of machines. It's the same caddy in my optiplex sff with a 4th Gen Intel
man I'm so glad I found your channel. this is my type of stuff. hope you do cool stuff like this in the future. excited to see what those other computers hold
9:57 😮
Omg.. Whoever that hard drive belongs to is on my team because he has WINAMP installed!!
That is the best music player that has ever been made for Windows!
I have dozens of plug-ins for that program as well as other things. You could even play games on it!
you can access the same way with 2 factor authentication because it would be like opening chrome on your own computer, it won't ask for the password every time you open it
Since it was on a different hardware, I’d figure it would ask for conformation on the other end.
I'm pretty sure the drive caddy the HDD was in is from a Dell Optiplex OEM desktop!
Also, you should definitely contact the owner of the HDD and tell them to protect their data/wipe old drives, etc
Could be!
If enough people watch the video/request it, I’ll make a follow up video, how bout that?
Yup, it sure is a Dell OEM caddy, though not 100% sure if it's from Optiplex, since Inspirons have pretty much the same ones.
@@OptiplexAircraft true, I saw the shade of blue and thought of Dell lol
@@dhyaan_v That and the sliding latch. I worked on one of them recently and had to move the drive bays out of the way to replace the case fan.
I usually run the "clean all" command in diskpart before selling or getting rid of an HDD. It essentially sets all the blocks to 0. DBAN is also a great program to completely wipe hard drives.
I mean, just wiping it honestly would get you 99.9% there.
Actually the command you are thinking of is "Clean" and it literally only blanks out a few bits on the drive itself; most of the data is fully recoverable with a recovery application. DBAN would work well. Another approach is to bitlocker the drive and then clear the TPM chip. It's not necessary to clear the TPM if the drive is a secondary drive however. I would not use Bitlocker if I used a Microsoft account on my PC however; as MS would still have the recovery password.
Have you tried using a magnet?
@@ProfessorChocolateCake Wacking it with a hammer is much quicker ;-)
11:27 "I have access to his browser history"
The horrors
The title made it seem like it would be something actually bad. Almost every computer I've ever got secondhand was the same situation.
in the UK knowingly accessing someone else's data is an imprisonable offence -
I don’t think it’s illegal here, but honestly I don’t really care. I haven’t done anything wrong. Sue me 😂
It's also imprisonable
In the UK, knowingly breathing is an imprisonable offense.
@@throwaway6478 what a twat
@ 😂
I have had hard drives come to me still ready to go with a complete set of documents, still signed into Google Chrome with all the logins saved, and I chuck them into a machine as second disk, format and the data wipe them. People don't often realise the dangers they put them selves in. He probably didn't know because the disk didn't boot any more and he considered it broken, so essentially for him it was job done. Sad isn't it?!?
@@fairmania probably what I’ll end up doing with this drive too. And yeah, it’s actually kinda scary.
If I'm dumping a HDD I take it apart, you'd have to know which order to place the platters in order to read it.
Well, if it’s taken apart, chances of it reading anything off those platters is slim to nothing 😂
I'd probably also scratch up the platters just to be sure.
@@stephaniethebatter7975 OR bend the heck out of them; like fold them over in half.
@@schvabek Maybe not with the drive's own controller, but keep in mind that data recovery companies DO exist. Sure, it's an expensive, non-trivial operation, but it's not always impossible.
@@falcon-ng6sd i'd imagine though that most people wouldn't bother going through forensic data recovery in the hope of maybe pulling some personal info off a discarded hard drive.
Sure best practice is to destroy the drive but I'd imagine a few formats and/or a 0 erase will be enough to deter 99% of people right?
Protip: old broken hard drives cotain nice strong magent and highly reflective metal platters, useful as a little mirrors.
I remeber buying one of them enclosures about 20 years and thinking, "they didn't didn't come with SATA" then I see the adaptor, plenty of space.
For the JAGs that claims he's a "criminal", if you dump your disk with your info, YOU are the responsible for what happens to your info.
Just like with your passwords, YOU chose the passwords, YOU are responsible.
JAG’s is a military term. Reveals your ignorance
@@ed0078 For those who don't watch TV, JAG is short for Judge Advocate General and is the office of lawyers. (The old TV show had lawyers doing the Naval Criminal Investigative Service's job so that there would be some action not requiring a pencil and or law-book.) Perhaps he/she should have used the term "legal eagles" for those who did not "stand fire-watch" for the people of their nation.
LMAO NO.. You are not allowed to enter someones house if they failed to lock doors etc
you are as stupid as this youtuber.
I subscribed at the part where you said "I havent used windows 11 yet"
same bro.
@@HowieDue416 hahahaha thanks 😂 I actually did use I’d a bit at work, but I don’t have it installed on any of my machines.
win11 is trash fr
I have this obsession with having the startmenu/taskbar on my left side of the screen. Unless I use extra apps in Windows 11 I can't do that. Which is stupid. Windows 11 is just Windows 10 with a different theme and a bit more "locked down".
I have found no good reason to upgrade to Windows 11.
There is an 11 now?
@@blackpanther50 where have you been for the last three years? Under a rock?
im happy people like you exist,your a kind person.
Thanks man, that’s very nice of you to say ❤
Are you alright in mind? How is he a good person? By going through someones stuff?
@ Any more nasty comments you’d like to post? 😂 I mean, just shoot. I’ve explained why I did why I did many times in the comments (as well as in the pinned comment), and I don’t mind you considering me a SOB. But you’ll have to live with the fact that some folks here in the comments don’t agree with you and have my back. Cheers.
Haven't watched the follow up yet, but that storage pretty well spans my IT career lol. I started just as Windows 95 was released and have reused quite a few drives in the past. Since I have been entrusted regularly with customer data, I always make sure their data is unrecoverable if given permission to reuse storage devices. Glad it was someone honest that ended up in possession of this information.
I did something like this when i was younger. It's a heart dropping feeling to get into something like that just to see personal stuff and immediately realize you shouldn't be snooping around there.
LOL at all the "OH THAT'S BAD"
@@markae0I mean, it is!! 😂
I think the reason the old computer wouldn't boot from the hard drive is because it doesn't support UEFI. Windows 11 requires UEFI, and will not boot on a system that only supports BIOS or is configured to use Legacy boot.
Yep, thanks!
Also windows 10 can't or wont upgrade to 11 unless you have 8 or more cores on your processor, it might not work on older computers even if it is already installed on the hard drive.
@@marcellucassen8033 That's wrong. I had a laptop with a quad-core processor that upgraded to Windows 11 just fine without tweaks or workarounds. Do you mean that it has to be an 8th gen Intel processor or newer, or do you mean that it has to have 8 or more threads? I believe that laptop had 8 threads, but it was an AMD CPU so I'm uncertain about the generation.
@@JoBot__ It could be 8 or more treads, in that case I misread the information about upgrading to windows 11.
I would call the guy's cell phone, tell him exactly what happened, and how lucky he is that someone not nefarious got a hold of the drive and what he should do. Because I have a moral standing due to my faith in Jesus Christ, I would help the guy protect his online data. (I am a little tech savvy myself. BTW, love the content).
Thanks man! I’ll have to think about what to do, honestly.
Calling the guy's cell phone sounds like a good idea at first... but nowadays, random folks with no sense of personal responsibility might be likely to try to get you arrested for identity theft or whatever. They're not smart and are likely to lash out at YOU for calling attention to their idiocy.
Or..... I'm assuming you have - or could easily find - his address.
Send a letter, anonymously of course - even post it from a different town miles away, somewhere completely random.
Then at least he knows he needs to upgrade his security, and has no way of knowing who has the drive.
I'd also probably remove this video from UA-cam, just in case he sees it.
1:22 its a caddy from a dell optiplex you can tell by the blue retaining plastic.
When I dumped my Precision Workstations in California last month... I used a Drill Press to destroy the Drives. I can buy replacement Workstations in the Philippines for next to nothing.
If the information is crucial, it’s not worth losing sleep over it, that’s very true.
This is crazy…. This is pure madness. So scary! Send him a message to educate him about good practices ! He needs it!!
Great (scary) video!
@@neurobioboy if the video blows up, I’ll do it 😂
I did the same thing and got someone SSN, Address, name Phone number etc. Literally shredded the HDD afterword's. To an unrecognizable level.
Good job man. I’ll wipe this HDD and use it in an old rig of some sort. I keep all my used HDDs, I always need spares for projects
this is why i dont like throwing out old laptops or pcs away unless the harddrive or any data in it are either unrecoverable or damaged beyond repair.
It's a good thing you found it and did the right thing. He probably thought the HDD was broken because he couldn't boot into windows anymore and didn't know how to use the recovery tool, then tossed it in the garbage. I've seen people buy a whole new computer just because their windows installation was corrupt, but ya cases like yours is why you should never throw out a hard drive unless it's been wiped with a deep level format then destroy the drive.
Accessing accounts without authorization, regardless of how you do it (found hdd, etc.), is illegal depending on the country you are in.
Pretty sure it’s not illegal in my country. I didn’t steal anything nor did I misuse anything. It was all for educational purposes
This is definitely getting into a gray area. If you were showing people the dangers of not wiping their hard drives and throwing them away by using an HDD you own and accounts you own, then I would see no problem with this. Signing into someone else's email or Instagram account without direct and explicit permission from the account owner, regardless if you steal anything or leak any of their information is definitely not something I would do. It is illegal in the US, Canada, Australia, EU, and many many other countries.
So if you found a phone on the street/someone’s laptop and you wanted to look up who it belongs to (and there is no immediate way of finding out), how would you go about doing that? If I, perhaps, wanted to contact the owner?
@@schvabek I understand what you're saying and not trying to attack you here. I want to reiterate the issue is NOT with finding the previous owners email address, phone number, passwords, etc. but it IS with using those to then log into their email account. It's the logging into the gmail account and others that is the issue. Which is not necessary in your example of needing to find a way to contact the previous owner.
@@Flex-c7o My issue (I mean not really, I don’t care that much) is people here are calling me out as a bastard and a criminal (not you necessarily) when my only intention was to show how dangerous and real this can be. And I did nothing to put this guy information and privacy in danger.
You should probably format the drive and forget about it. I wouldn't contact the guy. But that's just me.
Yeah, actually what I’ll do most likely. You just don’t know how the person will react
Wait until someone shows you virtual machines.
Depending on what you’re trying to do, it might be easier to use actual hardware. VM’s are not fool proof by any means.
@schvabek facts
06:19 Don't say it's unremarkable! I completed my 3D course on an Intel Core 2 Duo E2140!
04:05 Images of giant brown recluse spiders jumping out (was actually bitten 3x by one or more a little over a year ago...still causing symptoms).
You're insane for plugging a random drive into your computer with no precautions
It's not like he only has one computer and it's connected online all the time. He can easily wipe the drive and the system it's on if it gets infected.
@@johnt.848 You can see him plug it into the macbook in the video and then see it show up on Disk Utility along with his internal Apple SSD. The taskbar is not visible in the video, but even if he is not connected to the internet at that point, even unsophisticated malware can just wait until you reconnect. A random laptop in the dumpster likely wasn't left there with the intention of spreading malware, but you never know. That's the whole point of cybersecurity protocol. It's there for those anomalies where the bad thing actually happens, just like locking your front door. Rarely do random people try opening strangers' doors, but you want it locked in case someone does.
If you find a random USB/hard drive, you can plug it into a computer that you would not mind formatting the drive and reinstalling the OS on, does not have personal documents/information, and is not connected to the internet. Again it's unlikely, but you will really be kicking yourself if you make that mistake and suddenly some rando has root access to your computer.
@@drunkentrain And that is why I never connect random USBs I find or are given to any of my PCs.
I love this video - it's informative, entertaining, and overall sends the correct message about how much we need to protect ourselves nowadays. However, I noticed that while discussing data protection, you made multiple mistakes in the video, such as:
filming your street, which can be used to find your approximate location
filming your building's floor and other aspects, which can be used to identify the specific building
filming your house/storage keys, which is very dangerous since it's now easy to make copies from photos
I fully support the message that we should take care of our data, but please make sure you take care of yours too. With the information you've exposed, who knows what a malicious person could do.
@@mrsins5611 I wouldn’t call these mistakes, as I did this on purpose. I don’t want to be too paranoid (even though someone I guess could use this information maliciously). I don’t want to NOT be able to film where I live, be overly paranoid about showing every little detail in my video (although I have become more wary about that recently)… In that case I would probably not make videos at all. My videos are about sharing some things with my audience. And ain’t no one making duplicate keys with shots in this video, I can tell you that much (no way it’s detailed enough of a shot).
I’m not a data protection freak, but there’s a huge difference between showing your neighbourhood/apartment building, and leaving a bunch of passwords for someone to find. Not even comparable.
11:10 - personal info (GDPR ain't a thing in the US of A is it?)
who else read the title and immediately thought it was gonna be a hdd full of cod points? Glad it was just a message to delete all your data before disposing instead of that.
Some see terrifying HDD, I just see basically every drive I've ever found in thrown away computers.
Did you say six floors and no elevator? OMG
Yeah. Great workout though 😂