McCain Campaign Sells Off… Data?

Sad really when you think about it. This fully qualifies as a ‘kick when they’re down’. The McCain-Palin campaign had a fire sale this week. Well, turns out that they forgot to wipe data before letting the bargains head out the door.

From MyFoxDC:

We saw laptops ranging between $400 and $600 with logins like “WARROOM08.” We couldn’t log on without a password, but staffers assured us the hard drive would be zapped before it was sold, and the computer would probably work.

The hottest item? Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple.

And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.

When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.

And that just pertains to the devices that the reporter purchased. $DEITY only knows what treasures were on the computers and such that were purchased by other folks. I would hazard a guess that this will not be the only story that comes from this sale.

Moral of the story. Be sure to wipe your data when you dispose of your previous computers/mobile devices. You never know when it will make the evening news.

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Posted by Dave Lewis on December 12, 2008. Filed under Data Security,Dumbass,Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.