New York Driver data on a FusionIO drive

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
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So I bought a FusionIO drive after seeing Wendell occasionally show one on the Level1 YouTube channel.
I have an application in mind which is similar to a database that seemed like a good fit for the drive.

Well the drive arrived after being shipped from Texas to the UK and it hadn’t been formatted. I guess they never went through the effort as it’s a little bit of work to get the drivers installed. The firmware has to be updated to the same version as the driver before the drive can be used.

Anyway, there’s a large ~600GB SQL database on the drive. There’s is information on around 100,000 drivers licenses from New York. Age, Sex, Height, License number, Address, Driving violations, Police reports, insurance information ect.
The other parts of that database is seemingly encrypted (Just very long strings of letters separated by + and / (I know very little about SQL so maybe it means something)) but there’s a second smaller unencrypted database which is older but has literally everything visible.

It looks like this database was used by a number of insurance companies in New York as a backend to store everything. They reference an “Aspire” system which I figure is the front end of the system.
I can see the list of all the users from each insurance company as well as their passwords, email addresses and phone numbers in the older database.

So obviously now I’m going to format the drive and start my project.
It’s kind of surprising that I was able to stumble across all the data though.

Perhaps I should email someone but who do you email about finding this?

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Cool.

There might be money you can earn on the black market with that (terrible idea, don’t do it).

Personally, I’d format it and pretend I never noticed. Explaining how you got the data is a hassle, unless you’re feeling adventures and want to meet and hangout with the FBI.

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Do the US have an data security commissioner like the ICO in the UK or anything? I sm sure they would be interested. That sa8d they will probably want all the information about where and how uoy got it. And might be angry if you seem to know too much about what’s on it, even if that helps narrow that down to the company that sold it. They may even want the dr8ve for inspection.

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Dark Webs Wet Dream?

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lol no, the NY DMV sells this data to anyone that wants it already

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Contact authorities with the strange questions that entails, or format and forget it exists.

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This is why companies have have contracts telling them to chuck petabytes worth of drives through a woodchipper instead of selling used.

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I formatted the drive and sent a message to the seller on eBay.

I’m quite sceptical that it will change anything but at least it’s something.

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