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Are Copies of Yahoo E-mail Stored on my Harddrive?

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My ex-wife has pawned our old family PC. I know we ran Norton antivirus/spamguard/etc. and I also used Webroot Window Washer. However, I am concerned about the amount of personal, financial data included in e-mails. Let me stress that Yahoo is my ISP and we exclusively used Yahoo Mail for e-mail. I understand that these records are kept on Yahoo’s server and once deleted I no longer have access, but have also heard horror stories about data recovered from PC hard drives if improperly disposed. Is there any danger of deleted Yahoo mail still being accessible on my hard drive?

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Clarifications

In reply to Are Copies of Yahoo E-mail Stored on my Harddrive?

Clarifications

No not likely but that doesn’t mean that you are safe either

In reply to Are Copies of Yahoo E-mail Stored on my Harddrive?

As the Bank Account details will be stored on the HDD and every time that you access your Bank Account/s that will be stored as well as any on line transactions so things like Credit Card numbers and the like will be on the HDD.

If you accessed Bank Accounts from this system I would change the Log In Details now before anything can be stolen and do the same thing with credit cards.

Depending on how EX the wife is you may need to talk to your lawyer about this as well as if there is a divorce in progress this action may be constituted as an attempt to prevent your wife having access to the Join Account and Credit Cards. This may be far more expensive than a potential loss from an incorrectly disposed of HDD. Though if a security breach does occur and the money is stolen you will have proof that you are not responsible for what’s happened and push the blame onto the Ex but if there are any children involved that’s only going to make things worse for you.

Best advice is speak to the lawyer and get a Legal Definition of what to do as this really isn’t a technical question it’s much more a legal question with the possibility to cause you much more harm than good.

Col

Thanks

In reply to No not likely but that doesn’t mean that you are safe either

Thanks but not a legal matter at all. It wasn’t a malicious act and things are fine on that front. All bank account details and credit card matters have long since been changed. My concern was specifically about data I knew we had within specific e-mails and I wanted the reassurance that once deleted there is no record on the hard drive.

OH well in that case

In reply to Thanks

Provided that something like a Data Shredder utility was used the data will be safe from all but the most persistent people.

However saying that we never allowed a HDD out of the business when I was working Bank Security unless it went to one of the Upper Managements computers to be used by their kids. It’s possible to recover every layer of Data off a HDD but this is horrendously expensive but doable.

For some idea of what’s possible with relatively inexpensive software have a look here

http://tinyurl.com/n5gqk

I hope that helps you

Col

email stored…

In reply to Are Copies of Yahoo E-mail Stored on my Harddrive?

Short answer is “Yes” – it WAS. Any email viewed with a browser has every page that you looked at cached. That means it is a file, written to the HD.

If your scrubbing s/w is set to clear the browser cache – maybe the files were overwritten. Tools like evidence eliminator don’t really work all that well. A CMU student did a study on this and found that all the tools do not work 100%…and leave traces of their own.

If your browser was set to erase the cache when you closed it, then those files were deleted. As most scrubbing programs process by using the file name…which is now gone…so that data is still on the disk.

Any chance you could but it back?

CD

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