Servers large bankrupt computer store were for sale with all data still on it

The servers and hard drives of the Canadian bankrupt computer retailer Netlink Computer Inc., or NCIX, were put up for sale without being wiped clean. The systems contained details of credit card payments, among other things.

PrivacyFly’s Travis Doering discovered the storage media from the contents of NCIX, which went bankrupt last year, when he responded to a Craigslist ad for an “NCIX Database Server” for $1500. When he made an appointment with the salesperson, it turned out that this man, Jeff, was in charge of NCIX’s entire server farm on the east coast. Jeff would have had an appointment with the landlord of a storage place, who still had money from NCIX. Jeff would be allowed to copy source code and databases and sell the hardware in return.

He had already sold 500 of the company’s desktops and other business hardware, but still had 300 headquarters and branch desktops, 18 Dell PowerEdge servers, two Supermicro backup servers, 109 server hard drives and five hundred other hard drives.

Jeff allowed Doering to view the contents of the storage media, and he found, among other things, that it still contained personal information from Steve Wu, the founder of NCIX, including photos of his family and escort girls. In databases, Doering found personal data of hundreds of thousands of customers of the retail chain, including unencrypted passwords and credit card payments. This concerns data from 2007 to 2017. Doering has not been able to view everything, but believes that almost all data from NCIX is still present on the hardware, including source code and confidential company data. Jeff asked him $35,000 for the entire IT inventory.