Canadian military investigating after hard drive found at recycling depot

A 30-gigabytehard drive found at a recycling depot that aHalifax man says contains personal information including the namesand numbers of defence personnel has been taken by the military.

Pete Stevens, who works in the electronics industry, said hefound the hard drive about a year ago at a recycling depot andsuspected that it previously belonged to the military after runningrecovery software.

He said he recently decided to sift through the hundreds of filesafter hearing about security breaches at the military's East Coastintelligence centre and Canadian Forces Base Halifax.

Stevens said he recovered about 10 G of data from the 30 G harddrive, including 6,000 photos, spreadsheets with the names andnumbers of military personnel and their families, and completedapplications for security clearance.

"If that was me, I wouldn't want somebody like me having thatinformation," said Stevens in a phone interview on Saturday. "Idon't think we want to see any of our people serving in uniformexposed like that."

Suspected 3 years worth of files

Stevens said military officials came to retrieve the hard driveon Friday.

Military spokesman Maj. Martell Thompson said investigators areassessing the nature of the data on the hard drive.

Hesaid the incident is "highly unusual." Protocols implementedin 2008 require hard drives to be destroyed once they are no longeroperational, he said.

IT expert finds military hard drive

9 years ago

Duration 4:48

Pete Stevens stumbled upon a 30-gigabyte hard drive containing personal information of defence personnel at a recycling depot in Halifax last year

"I've not heard of something like this happening before," saidThompson on Saturday.

"The Department of National Defence policydictates that once hard drives are life-cycled out of operation,they are removed from Canadian Armed Forces networks and sortedprior to destruction."

Stevens said the files on the hard drive appear to be from theyears 1999 to 2005.

Recent security breaches

He said he used basic software to recover the files and predictshe got about half the information on the hard drive. He saidrecovering personal information from discarded hard drives is notuncommon, but he was surprised and concerned in this case because ofthe nature of the information.

"Obviously you don't normally come across things like this. Iwas definitely surprised to see what I saw," said Stevens, who sayshe recovers data from old hard drives as a hobby.

In addition to personal information, he told CBC Newsthat it also contained Power Point presentations, blueprints of ships and documents outlining "specified procedures for certain scenarios."

"I have friends and family members in the Forces so I think I speak for most Canadians when I say we don't want to see them exposed, especially their information and their addresses and their phone numbers and everything," he said.

Rear Admiral John Newton confirmed earlier lastweek there werefive "non-nefarious breaches"of a secure military computernetwork at Canadian Forces Base Halifax's navy training school.

Thenews came days after a larger breach of information at HMCS Trinity,the military's East Coast intelligence centre, was made public.

Newton said the breaches were found after the navy began securityscans of its system in September.

To avoid such breaches in the future, Stevens suggests the military encrypt its hard drives, run data-scrubbing software and just to be safe drill three to four holes in the drive to destroy the devices.