Theft of information is one of the hardest-hitting and fastest growing illegal occupations in the 21st century. Just about any kind of information that can be gleaned from seemingly innocuous sources can be used to steal your identity by those determined to do so. If something as basic as social media or even as negligible as junk mail can be used to create false accounts, can you imagine what can be done with the information stored on your hard drive? Or worse yet, the information stored on the hard drives of your business?
Information and Technology security is a fledgling operation. Unfortunately, criminals and those looking to steal your information understand it better than honest, hard-working people. Mostly, people take information security for granted. Virus checkers, firewalls, and ever-changing passwords lull most of us into a false sense of security. But what about the data physically written onto the media inside your computer and servers? Where does it go once it becomes outdated or damaged? Where does it go when it needs replacement?
Just because the information stored on your computer is no longer accessible to you, due to a system crash or file corruption, this does not mean that the files you have saved aren’t accessible to someone else. In the wrong hands, your hard-drive will become a wellspring of free information, which can allow access to your systems and files, bank accounts, or simply used to generate false identities for other criminals who get to commit more crimes in your name. Care to guess who the police will come looking for in case of any fraud committed by someone with your identity? It won’t be the criminals.
Hard Drive Crusher
This is why a hard drive crusher is crucial to protecting your assets. Just reformatting a media volume and sending your hardware to the recycler isn’t enough. Doing so merely removes the stops on the writable volume and allows the potential for overwritten. Most of the time, your data is completely salvageable. Physical destruction of the media is the only way to permanently erase the data. That in and of itself is no easy task. Hard-drives are built strongly and you would be surprised exactly what can be recovered even if they are smashed, exposed to magnets, or even set on fire. Crushing is the best way to thwart unwanted recovery of sensitive items.
Contact us if you want to protect yourself from information theft.
