Andrew Reeser reports:
A computer repair shop in Macon that bought used computers from a government auction site says the ones they were sold had personal information of city employees still in the hard drives.
A police report says BC Computer Repair in Macon bought the computers on govdeals.com in 2011. Then, on January 5th of this year, after the computers had been sitting in storage for some time, they discovered the hard drives still had information that looked like social security numbers, pensions and other personal information of Macon Police officers.
[…]
Davis says there are about 40 hard drives that computer forensics experts are going through, to find out just how much sensitive information was left in them.
Read more on 41NBC while I go check my calendar to see if we’re still in the 1990’s.
The Macon Telegraph reports that in addition to information on Macon Police, there was also information from local businesses. Until the forensics are completed on the 39 hard drives, 2 servers, and 2 CPU’s that were bought, we won’t know the extent of this incident. Nor do we know how many other computers the city sold at auction that may have been bought by others.
The city’s Information Technology Department is supposed to wipe drives before they’re sold at surplus. Were these drives ever sent to them? Who is going to be held accountable for this? And how many other city computers were purchased by others that might also contain PII?