When Data Recovery becomes a more than you bargained for...
The surprising circumstances surrounding the hard drives brought to us never cease to amaze. "It was stepped on...", "I knocked it off the desk...", "My laptop fell off the roof of the car as I drove away" are how some of the more mild stories start.
We received a drive to be recovered the other day that had very little information regarding ownership and exactly what kind of information we might find on the drive. The customer was "surprised" to find out that the drive's contents were encrypted (all the bits of data are scrambled to protect against theft).
We contacted our client to obtain the encryption credentials so that we could extract the data he had requested. He was unable to provide any credentials, hmmm...?? While trying to determine which encryption solution was protecting the data (we thought that might jog his memory), we discovered a splash screen that referenced private data from a state agency could be on the drive. Now this is getting interesting!
So we have a client with little history about his drive, unclear about what his wants, data that is encrypted, and no encryption credentials from the client. To me that all adds up to a hard drive that was not "obtained" through standard channels.
Our next step was to contact the state agency. They couldn't confirm that they were missing a hard drive since it was delivered to us out of it's laptop enclosure, but they surely wanted to review the data on it. So, off the drive goes to this unnamed state agency.
We will have to wait and see what happens with this case. At least I know this, data recovery is never boring.