No matter what device you’re reading this article on, there are at least five things nearby that can help you destroy your device’s hard drive. Water might do the trick if you have a solid-state drive and a lot of luck. A magnet might work, but only if you get past the steel plate protecting the data. Any suitable heavy object can crush most of your data if you dismantle the inner workings first, especially if you have glass platters like in a laptop. Once you dismantle your device you might even smash it against the ground with good results. Just be sure to put on gloves first so you don’t cut your hands.
But the problem with all of these methods isn’t that they don’t work. It’s that they don’t work completely. It’s also that it’s impossible to know by how much they didn’t work. If you scratch up your desktop computer’s hard drive, for example, you won’t be able to get any more work done on it. You probably can’t retrieve any data with easily available consumer hardware. But potentially malicious actors, just like data forensics experts, have more than the standard hardware.
People who really want your company’s data have better tools to access the information than you do. It’s possible to read between cracks and fractures. With increases in machine learning and pattern recognition, it’s even possible for programs to make their best guess at the data destroyed based on the recoverable data around it.
Two Reasons
The idea that you can destroy your own hard drives and not be aware of its recoverability is dangerous for two reasons, even before any data is recovered by unauthorized parties:
- You’ll keep trying to destroy data incompletely.
- Any risk of a data breach, not just a data breach itself, potentially violates your company’s HIPAA or data privacy compliance requirements.
Contact Phiston
Instead of guessing at how complete your destruction was, get a guarantee. Go to Phiston Technologies for hard drive and hard disk crushers that are specifically designed for data destruction.
