NASA’s shuttle PCs sold with sensitive data intact, insert WikiLeaks joke here.

Let this be a warning for John and Jane Q. Public (always a cute couple, those two) to always wipe sensitive / secret data from your hard drives before selling a computer. Or better yet, take out the drive entirely and physically destroy it. That’s what we’d expect from our government entities, but an internal investigation found that a number of PCs and components from NASA‘s shuttles had been sold from four different centers — Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers, and Ames and Langley Research Centers — that “failed sanitization verification testing,” or weren’t even tested at all. In Langley’s case, while hard drives were being destroyed, “personnel did not properly account for or track the removed hard drives during the destruction process.” Meanwhile at Kennedy, computers were found being prepped for sale that still had “Internet Protocol information [that] was prominently displayed.” Helluva way to start a shuttle launch retirement, eh?

Okay, who let the genius out of the locked room?

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