at auction
In Japan, eighteen hard drives containing taxpayer data ended up at an auction. The data carriers should actually have been destroyed, but were instead offered by an employee of the recycling company.

NHK reports that . Nine hard drives had already surfaced, but now another nine have been added, bringing the total to eighteen. Each of these hard drives comes from the Kanagawa Provincial Government, which had rented the equipment from Fujitsu. As the disks were due for replacement, the provincial government had sent them back to the manufacturer and exchanged them for a set of new disks.

Fujitsu then had to ensure that the old hard drives were destroyed. They outsourced this to the Broadlink company. However, an employee of the latter would have offered the hard drives online at an auction. It then turned out that it included data from Japanese Taxpayers.

Incidentally, not all files on the hard drives were readable, and not all of them ended up with one buyer. A number of hard disks have not yet been recovered, so the full extent of the leak is not yet clear. There are also other Japanese provinces that have rented hard drives from Fujitsu; it is now examined whether the old hard drives have actually been destroyed.