Dumpster Diving or Trashing

Prevalent in the 1980s because of poor security. Crackers would search in Dumpsters of major corporations for discarded manuals containing computer passwords and users’ credit card numbers. Corporations, aware of the need for increased security, tended by the early 1990s to shred documents before placing them in Dumpsters. In some jurisdictions in the United States and in the United Kingdom, Dumpster diving is considered to be theft.

See Also: Security; Social Engineering Techniques.