Your business likely has plenty of security in place to prevent hackers from getting into your network and stealing private information like credit card numbers. After all, whenever a business fails at this, it’s soon all over the news. This prompts most to quickly implement more security measures to make sure it doesn’t happen at their companies. Such action is great. If your network security is top-notch, kudos to you – but have you thought of the security of the hardware you’re no longer using?
It’s typical for computer hardware to be replaced every so often. It is done to upgrade systems, prevent failures, and fix parts that are no longer working the way they should. When old hard drives are removed, however, they can’t just be thrown away. Some criminals and snoops will grab up old hard drives to take them home and crack them at their leisure. Companies are usually aware of this. So they implement a variety of measures to protect data security even after hard drives, thumb drives, CDs, and other media are decommissioned.
Hard drive eraser
Unfortunately, many use a hard drive eraser as a key component in their security programs for decommissioned drives. It turns out that data “destroyed” in this way usually isn’t destroyed at all. In some cases, running a simple data recovery program will undo the supposed erasure and restore all of the files. This is because of flaws in how such eraser programs work. Instead of truly destroying data, they simply make it so standard systems don’t bring it up. Even advanced erasers, which claim to overwrite the data, can be defeated with the right technology.
The only way to truly destroy the data on a hard drive is to physically destroy the hard drive itself. Even though some people on forums talk about melting the disk down, hard drive crushing is quite enough to do the job. Our hard drive crushers will smash drives into thousands of tiny pieces, making it truly impossible to recover their contents.
For hardware security that truly lives up to the name, just contact us. We’ll let you know all of the options for keeping the data on decommissioned hard drives and other equipment completely safe from prying eyes.
