This is barely believable.............With this sort on nonsense why should anybody bother about IT security?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Child abuse reports, Social Security numbers and other highly sensitive data were discovered on a batch of government computers headed for the auction block to be sold by the State of New Jersey, authorities said on Thursday.
State workers preparing the equipment for sale had opted not to use a device designed to magnetically erase sensitive data from hard drives because it was noisy, the comptroller's office said in a news release.
"The first thing we did was suspend the auctions and remove all the hard drives," McAleer told Reuters.
Among the delicate information found on the computers was a list of state-supervised children, along with their birth dates and Medicaid numbers, a state judge's file including his life insurance, tax returns and attorneys in disputes or with emotional problems and personnel reviews and computer passwords of state employees.
Now that the hard drives have been removed, many of the computers are now being sold without them, McAleer said.
Oh sure! the auction must go on.......

ARTICLE

http://whtc.com/news/articles/2011/m...ensitive-data/