File deleted? Not really

Capital One's ad slogan is "What's in your wallet?" but an Orem company believes what's on a hard drive — even one that's been reformatted — is a veritable gold mine for ne'er-do-wells, troublemakers and cheats.

Armed with evidence that supposedly "clean" hard drives can yield tons of personal information that can be used for identity theft, fraud or worse, WhiteCanyon Inc. has a pair of programs that work like software Swiffers.

"A lot of people don't understand that when you delete a file, it's not really gone," said Steve Elderkin, president and chief executive officer. "At the next level, some people talk about partitioning and formatting drives, and if you do a low-level format, you'll be OK. But the format command only verifies that the disk is OK. It doesn't write over the data."

WhiteCanyon has two permanent-deletion products that can help ensure that those underlying bits of personal info don't get snatched up by predators. WipeDrive is designed to sanitize hard drives just before they're sold, donated or recycled. SecureClean ensures deleted stuff is gone but, unlike WipeDrive's comprehensiveness, aims at specific files.

Think such problems can't happen to you? A pair of Massachusetts Institute of Technology grad students was able to pull several thousand credit card numbers, medical correspondence, bank account information and government employment records from only 158 hard drives they obtained on the secondary market, most through eBay auctions.

WipeDrive, introduced in 1999, overwrites all pre-existing data on hard drives, wiping out operating system program files and other private or personal data as well as partition tables and drive formats.

WipeDrive 3.0 retails for $39.95 for individuals and allows each to wipe 20 hard drives an unlimited number of times. A professional version starts at $99.95 and allows an unlimited number of hard drives to be overwritten an unlimited number of times. Moreover, large companies can take advantage of site licensing. A pricing example is $995 for up to 2,500 computers.

"Everybody who owns a computer puts personal information on it," Elderkin said. "There are few people who don't. And lately, donated computers have turned into a smorgasbord of information for hackers.

"People take their PC with all that information and take it to someplace like (Deseret Industries) or some other charity. People don't have to hack into someone else's computer. They can just go to the store, get some off the shelf and away they go. They can take their time, thumbing through all the information."