New research from Navigant Consulting suggests that slack handling of computers destined for the second-hand market could make them an identity-thief's dream. To demonstrate the potential dangers, the consultancy purchase three second-hand computers last week, and determined that one of them still contained sensitive personal information on the hard drive. It's not enough to simply wipe the hard drive using most basic operating system tools, as anyone with some tech knowledge can recover data from a disk that's supposedly been wiped. Simply dumping the hard drives intact isn't a good plan either - it's akin to putting your paper-based financial documents in the waste bin without shredding them first. One second-hand computer recovered from a community college still contained student and staff details, including names and addresses, budgets, payroll information, photos, and bank account details.