Sometimes I hear a story that is simply breathtaking in its stupidity and potential for disaster. For your delectation, horror, and amazement, here is one relayed to me by a good friend a few days ago. He's living in a European country that shall remain unnamed; in addition, the names and some details have been changed to protect the guilty (and the very dumb). It was transmitted to me via Skype, so I've also cleaned up the spelling and punctuation common to IM conversations so that it's more readable.

I've touched on this one before, and I know it seems like common sense to the folks reading this column, but my pal's story sure makes one thing painfully clear: many (most?) "ordinary" users don't understand the concepts of wiping a hard drive securely before relinquishing a computer. It's one thing to drag your personal files to the trash and then empty it - lots of people undoubtedly think that will be enough to protect them. A few more knowledgeable ones understand that trashed files can still be recovered, so they want to remove that sensitive data more completely. This usually means asking a friendly computer nerd for advice or help, or Googling for freeware, or paying for some commercial piece of software that will overwrite data the necessary number of times. (Editor's note: Mac users can use the Secure Empty Trash menu to securely delete files.) A tiny number of people - call them "paranoid security experts" - will go the final step and drill, bash, or bend their hard drives so that the data will be totally unrecoverable.

The link for this article located at SecurityFocus.com is no longer available.