What Is Cyber Security Month Dumpster Diving. Dumpster diving dumpster diving is when a hacker goes through the trash that employees have thrown away and looks for sensitive information, such as: An attacker may use innocent looking information like a phone list, calendar, or organizational chart to gain access to the network.

Since the information is in the trash, it is not useful for the owner but deemed useful to the picker. The more common form of dumpster diving, as it pertains to hacking and identity thieves is information diving. Dumpster diving can mean looking through physical trash for such information, or searching discarded digital data.