# Dumpster Diving

Searching through an organization's or individual's discarded trash to find sensitive documents or information.

**Dumpster diving[↗](/dumpster-diving)** is the practice of searching through discarded trash, whether from a home or an office, to find sensitive information like discarded bank statements, printed passwords, internal memos, or old hard drives that weren't properly destroyed. It's a low-tech but surprisingly effective form of information gathering used in social engineering[↗](/social-engineering).

An attacker armed with details found in the trash, an org chart, a vendor name, an employee's title, can craft a far more convincing phishing[↗](/phishing) email or pretext call. Shredding sensitive paperwork and properly wiping or destroying old storage devices before disposal closes off this attack path entirely.