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Personal data found on many used hard drives
JoongAng Daily2004.3.9
Many secondhand computer hard drives that are being sold through the Internet formerly belonged to businesses and are therefore full of business records containing personal information, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), a leading local science and technology school, said yesterday.
To determine whether personal information had been properly deleted, the business database research team at KAIST"s business school conducted an experiment in which it randomly bought 41 hard drives through Internet auction sites beginning in April 2003 and analyzed their contents.
It said 26 hard drives out of the total, or 65 percent, had not even been reformatted to remove data. On those drives were business records containing the names, birth dates, home and company addresses, telephone numbers and health examination records of 1,349 people. Also, the team found 568 resident identification numbers on the drives.
"Secondhand hard disks are an open storehouse of personal information [from business records]," said the team"s head, Moon Young-chul. "We found such personal data for an average of 60 people per used disk."
Mr. Moon said that reformatting hard drives alone will not delete all information recorded on them. He said special software designed to completely delete data should be used or such disks should be destroyed.
2004.03.15 View 12372 -
[Unknown] Wins Program Competition
By Taeg-sang Cho
The KAIST Herald December 3, 2003
The 3rd Korean Collegiate Programming Competition took place on November 7 at Sky-city Convention Center, Seoul. This competition is organized by the Ministry of Telecommunication and is sponsored by KAIST, ACM, and Korean Information Science Institution. This year"s preliminary competition consisted of 112 teams from 50 domestic universities, and 53 teams were selected from the preliminaries. In total, sixty teams, including foreign teams, participated in the main competition that took place at the Sky-city Convention Center.
This year"s competition was won by "Unknown" from KAIST; this team is composed of three students: Min-sang Noh, Gih-moon Song, and Joong-geun Lee. Last year"s competition was also won by a team from KAIST.
In this year"s competition, five teams solved all the problems, but "Unknown" was the best in organizing the programs and in employing various concepts into the program. Another team from KAIST, "KIN~" won 4th Prize.
The winner of this competition automatically becomes an Asian representative at the ACM- International Collegiate Programming Competition (ACM-ICPC) along with the winners of collegiate competitions from Japan, China, India, and Iran. The 28th ACM-ICPC is to be held in March 2004.
2004.03.15 View 19750