Technology
Man goes to a flea market to buy hard drives for 5 euros and finds 500 gigabytes of unusual data on them
A man from the Netherlands stumbled upon a ‘gold mine’ of personal information on hundreds of people.
What appeared to be an unimportant second-hand purchase turned out to be a worrying discovery about the security of personal data. As reported in Tivi, Robert Polet, a Dutch computer enthusiast, bought five hard drives at a flea market near the Weelde airport in Belgium, paying only five euros each. But when he checked them, he discovered that they contained highly sensitive medical information on patients in the Netherlands.
The disks, each with a capacity of 500 gigabytes, contained personal data on citizens of Utrecht, Houten and Delft, collected between 2011 and 2019. The information included identification numbers, dates of birth, addresses and detailed medical records. If it had fallen into the wrong hands, it could have been used for fraud and even identity theft. Investigating the origin of the records, Polet discovered that they belonged to Nortade ICT Solutions, a company that provided IT services to the healthcare sector and is no longer in business. Alarmed by his discovery, he returned to the flea market to purchase the remaining disks that the seller had available.
Nortade ICT Solutions, the owner of the information, is in a lot of trouble
According to Dutch law, the disposal of medical data can only be done by certified professionals and must be verified. However, it is suspected that Nortade ICT Solutions decided to sell the disks without deleting the data in order to avoid the costs of the secure deletion process and to recoup some money. This case highlights serious failures in the management of personal data and raises questions about how devices containing such sensitive information ended up for sale at a flea market without any protection.
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