For a long time now, we have been told that as long as we manage our financial stuff on https and SSL protected sites, our confidential information can't fall into the wrong hands. The promise is that once the browser is closed, highly sensitive data, such as, your account number, balance, statements, credit reports, etc, are cleared to protect your privacy. However, a study conducted by security firm Independent Security Evaluators proved us all wrong.
The shocking finding was that 21 of the 30 sites tested, including PayPal, Allstate, Verizon Wireless, Equifax and Scottrade, save and store sensitive data on customers' disk caches, even though companies are strictly required not to.
This, obviously, poses serious privacy issues. As an expert at ISE sums it up:
The fact that the unencrypted, disk cached data is only stored on the user's personal machine should not be discounted. The possibilities for this information to be exposed are numerous: malware infections, theft of laptops and mobile devices, theft of physical backup media or compromise of "cloud" backup services, shared machines and user accounts, and of course, shared computers in libraries, hotels, and Internet cafes.
Unfortunately, hackers know it all too well how to retrieve that sensitive data from your hard drive. But to be able to locate and manually remove it, takes more advanced skills than most PC users have. And even if you manage to remove it, the inherent weakness of Windows deletion still leaves that data exposed. The problem is that when you delete a file in Windows, the files doesn't get removed, or destroyed. It only gets marked available for overwriting, but remains on your hard drive as long as it doesn't actually get overwritten.
To guarantee your confidential data top-security protection, you need to regularly destroy that cached information with east-tec Eraser. The software is designed to seek out sensitive cached data stored on your hard drive and wipe it beyond recovery. The wipe methods employed by the application offer you military and government grade data erasure and privacy so by regularly running east-tec Eraser you can make sure that financial companies won't compromise your security with hard drive cache.