Abstract
International research has shown that individuals and companies in other countries do not always fully remove the data from their computer data storage devices before disposing of them. Typically this means when people are disposing of their computer hard drives there is a wealth of personal or corporate information that can be exploited to commit such crimes as identity theft, fraud, stalking and blackmail.
A further literature review showed that no such “data remanence” research for hard drives (or any other data storage devices such as mobile phones, USB thumb drives and the like) had been conducted in New Zealand.
The methodologies for all relevant hard drive data remanence experiments were compared and then used to design the most appropriate methodology for this research.
100 second hand hard drives were then sourced nationally across New Zealand for the experiments of this research to determine the baseline of data remanence for hard drives in New Zealand. The results of the experiments were then compared with international results to determine how New Zealand compares and what if any further actions (such as education) should be taken.