Take Care when Buying Second Hand

When I bought this computer, pre used via Ebay, I had to do some work to strip out all the previous owners software. While it appeared to have been deleted by the previous owner more than half of the eighty gigabytes of the hard drive was inaccessible. So before I loaded any of my software I cleared it down removing fifty or sixty gigs of the junk that was on there.

I took my time to install my software checking each one before loading the next. Further, I kept on running the security software checking that I was clean of viruses and spy ware.

Because of the care that I do take, I was puzzled by the fact that at times my computer was sometimes doing strange things. I do mean strange as commands were operating when I was not executing them. As I don't use wireless technology specifically because there is a risk of others gaining access so while I suspected spy ware, when I ran the security software nothing was found.

So yesterday I called in an engineer to check my system over. What he found was shocking. There was spy ware there, but this had been installed not self installed by a previous owner. It was embedded in such a way that it was undetectable by conventional security scans.

While it had recorded every key stroke, it looks as though none of this information had been accessed. What probably helped was that unlike most people I turn off the power to everything including the router when I switch off.

What the engineer told me that I should have done though was to reformat the Hard Drive when I got the computer. While nothing seems to have been lost, the computer doing odd things was access trying to be gained rather than actual access.

I contacted the seller and told him of the problem. He told me that he he had bought the computer second hand to cannibalise the parts. He then rebuilt it using parts from other computers to sell it. This sounds credible as it looked as though this was what happened when I received it. He was really sorry and even offered to pay for the engineer, I declined this but I asked him if he was willing to talk to the police, the engineer says he will be reporting this to the police. Reluctantly he agreed and I was able to confirm the contact details were correct too.

Anyway the main reason for making this posting is to forewarn folks, if you do buy a second hand computer, reformat the hard drive to clean it. That is the only real way to ensure that there is nothing on the drive.

While I am not stupid or gullible, even I didn't realise that I should be doing this.