Sacramento Credit Union Announces Outage Due to Ransomware Attack

Patelco Credit Union, a Sacramento-based credit union with 37 local branches, has confirmed that its recent security breach occurred due to a ransomware attack.  In an email sent to the members of the credit union, Patelco CEO Erin Mendez said...
July 2, 2024

The IBM 350: Weird Facts About the First Commercial Hard Drive

We’re approaching the 70th anniversary of the hard disk drive (and despite a  popular misconception, hard drive sales are still going strong). Without HDDs, modern computing wouldn’t be possible, and when the IBM 350 was introduced in 1956, it jump-started...
July 2, 2024

Lockbit Ransomware Group Announces Breach of U.S. Federal Reserve

The Lockbit 3.0 ransomware group claims to have breached the United States Federal Reserve, exfiltrating about 33 terabytes of potentially sensitive data.  The group claims that the stolen data includes “Americans’ banking secrets,” though they have not yet published any...
June 24, 2024

Ransomware Attack Causes Blood Shortages at London Hospitals 

A ransomware attack targeting Synnovis, a U.K. healthcare partnership, has significantly disrupted medical procedures in several of London’s largest hospitals.  The incident has prevented hospitals from matching patients’ blood types at a normal frequency. Surgeries and other procedures that require...
June 12, 2024

Data Recovery Myths: Can You Move Hard Drive Platters to Another Drive?

Frequently, our clients will ask us about how the data recovery process works — and providing a quick answer can be difficult, because every case presents a different set of challenges.In some situations, we’re able to restore files by...
June 11, 2024

Recovering Data From a Previous Version of an Excel Spreadsheet

You’ve accidentally made changes to an Excel spreadsheet, and you want to roll them back. Good news: It’s not an especially difficult task.  Newer versions of Microsoft’s Excel software include a Version History feature, which you can use to restore...
May 29, 2024

What Is Hard Drive Platter Contamination?

Hard drive platter contamination occurs when foreign particles (or contaminants) reach the platters that store your data. The platters are thin metal or plastic discs covered with a thin magnetic material.  Under normal conditions, read/write heads float just above the...
May 14, 2024

Ascension Confirms Ransomware Attack, Ongoing Recovery Efforts

Ascension, which operates 140 hospitals across the United States, has confirmed that an ongoing service outage was caused by a ransomware attack.  The organization says that they have implemented procedures to “ensure patient care delivery continues to be safe and...
May 13, 2024

Before Recycling a Hard Drive, Read This

You should never toss a hard drive into a dumpster — hard drives are recyclable, and given that we create more than 59 million tons of electronic waste every year, every bit of recycling counts (pardon the pun).  But while...
May 8, 2024

Will Hard Drive Prices Rise Due to AI?

An analysis from Trendforce predicts that global prices for hard disk drives (HDD) will rise significantly in the near future, spurred in part by rising demand created by artificial intelligence (AI).  The analysis is fairly barebones; Trendforce quotes reports from...
May 7, 2024