Computers everywhere

Branden Williams at the Security Convergence Blog has this outstanding article about places your personal data can reside that you rarely consider.

Folks, don’t forget, that every one of these devices that you plug into the wall or has a battery is basically a computer. Sure, it may not be the one that you are reading this post on, but it is a scaled down version of the same technology.

You know that VOIP phone sitting on your desk? Yep, a computer. Aside from the data security issues associated with outdated or known vulnerable software, there is data on that thing. How long it lives, or what it stores depends on the device.

BE SURE to destroy all of the data on the device before handing it over. For appliances or self contained units such as TiVos or PS3s.

Computers are everywhere. Like lint. Most of us don’t really stop to consider that our old TiVo Series2 has several orders of magnitude more computing power that NASA had available for the Apollo 11 moon landing. And since TiVo is not only a subscription service itself, but can interface with a number of other subscription services like NetFlix, there is definitely personally identifiable information (PII) stored on board as well.

So think long and hard before trading in or repurposing (outside your control) your DVR or game console, since most don’t really provide a simple way to wipe the storage without destroying the unit. It’s probably better to take Branden’s advice:

using the super destructo method of a big magnet or a commercial shredder certainly becomes a more reasonable solution.

And more fun too.