"We live in a world where personal and company information is a highly valuable commodity. It is important that people do everything they can to stop their details from falling into the wrong hands," Graham said.

"Today's findings show that people are in danger of becoming a soft touch for online fraudsters simply because organizations and individuals are failing to ensure the secure deletion of the data held on their old storage devices."

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at , or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .

in Computerworld's Security Topic Center.