Hard drives with data Japanese taxpayers appear at auction

In Japan, eighteen hard drives containing taxpayers’ data have ended up at an auction. The data carriers should have been destroyed, but were instead offered by an employee of the recycling company.

NHK reports that. Nine hard drives had already surfaced, but now nine more have been added, bringing the total to eighteen. Each of these hard drives came from the Kanagawa provincial government, which had rented the equipment from Fujitsu. Since the discs were due for replacement, the provincial government had returned them to the manufacturer and exchanged them for a set of new discs.

Fujitsu then had to ensure that the old hard drives were destroyed. They outsourced that to the company Broadlink. However, an employee of the latter is said to have offered the hard drives online at an auction. It turned out that it contains data from Japanese taxpayers, among other things.

Incidentally, not all files on the hard disks were readable, and not all of them ended up with one buyer. A number of hard drives have not yet been recovered, so the full extent of the leak is not yet clear. There are also other Japanese provinces that have rented hard drives from Fujitsu; It is now checked whether the old hard disks have actually been destroyed.