Dumped computers exploited in overseas fraud

CRIMINAL networks are feeding off Australians' lust for complete fresh technology by skimming data from computers dumped in Africa and Asia - and using it for blackmail, fraud and identity theft.
They will pay the most quantity as $200 on the black marketplace for discarded computer exhausting drives, that they mine for bank details, mastercard numbers and account passwords.
These exhausting drives are among the mountains of electronic waste earmarked for recycling here. Instead, they are illegally shipped to developing countries by operators seeking larger profits.
At an analogous time, quite 230 million things of e-waste - from televisions to computers - are buried in native landfill once a year, creating a toxic pollution draw back. Others are being resold with confidential data intact, creating opportunities for fraud in Australia.

In one native case, the previous computers of a tv network were found with the private phone numbers of politicians, storylines and staff records, as soon as a pair of months once the files were created.
Elsewhere, dumped computers contained tax file numbers, asset lists and income details for purchasers of an enormous accounting firm. In another case, the records of a significant medical services company included the highly confidential medical histories of patients and evaluations of doctors' performance.
Geordie Gill, who runs a Sydney e-waste recycling service, said he had been approached by operators giving to want e-waste for free of charge of charge, arousing his suspicions it'd are heading overseas.
Sending e-waste overseas is cheaper, but its export is banned and thus the Department of Sustainability and setting is currently investigating the invention of Australian e-waste dumped in Ghana.
Jim Puckett, an investigator from the Washington-based Basel Action Network, said computers were sent to cybercrime hotspots Nigeria and Ghana, where exhausting drives fetched $US200.
''At initial exhausting drives were being sold for regarding $25 but the value has risen for exhausting drives with data intact,'' he told Fairfax. ''People do not seem in reality in mind that they are exposing themselves to those personal crimes.''
Mr Puckett said they'd found dumped data from organisations just like the planet Bank and child-protection agencies.
Legitimate recycling companies in Sydney say the central ought to do lots of to prevent the illegal shipments of second-hand hardware.
''In Africa, the way they're doing it's plug throughout an influence offer to the exhausting drive and rip out the info,'' said Mr Gill. ''It is simply too easy - some of plugs which they need it. it's scary. you can't stop the youngsters in Africa going over the pile of computers. it's to forestall here.''
Professor Craig Valli, a cyber security knowledgeable from Edith Cowan University, heads its Security analysis Centre in collaboration with four universities around the world. they have spent the past five years analysing second-hand exhausting drives.
Professor Valli said once a year they understand lots of classified knowledge leaving people very exposed to identity theft and blackmail.
Australian Federal Police Superintendent Benjamin McQuillan, of the National Organised Crime Taskforce, warns that, before discarding devices, Australians got to be compelled to destroy exhausting drives or use memory-wiping programs to delete data.