Staying competitive in business today requires that you keep pace with new technology. This includes the office hardware that you use. However, this brings up the question of what to do with your old hardware. Selling or discarding it poses a security risk because of the information stored on their hard drives. As a result, people with criminal intent can recover and exploit sensitive information about your business, employees, and customers.
Those without knowledge of data recovery techniques may incorrectly assume their data is safe. Here are two false justifications for failing to destroy the hard drives of old office hardware:
I Can Delete the Files on My Hard Drive
For many computing devices, file deletion does not actually delete the file. Instead, it deletes the information that points to the beginning and ending of the file. The space containing the file itself is then marked as being available for future file storage. The file may remain as it is for a long time or may get fully or partially overwritten by a new file. Overwriting a file merely replaces sensitive information with new information that could be equally sensitive. Data recovery tools of all kinds and capabilities abound, including some very powerful software.
Password Protects My Sensitive Files
Deleting the password-protected files might seem a sensible precaution to some people. That’s because they feel they’ve taken a double-layered security measure. Not only must the cyber criminal recover the deleted files, he must also get past a password barrier. While this measure does introduce two barriers, they’re relatively flimsy. As mentioned previously, deleted file recovery is easy with the right tools.
Cracking a password-protected file can be almost as effortless. There are lots of password cracking software available today. Some are general-purpose, while others specialize in specific file types, such as excel files.
These tools often use dictionary lists of commonly used words, prefixes, suffixes, and alphanumeric combinations. If this fails to correctly guess the password, the brute force technique is used. This permutates through every possible character combination until the password is cracked. If any of your employees use convenient but weak passwords, opening the file may take less than a few minutes.
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On the other hand, no amount of cleverness or technology can extract data from a hardware drive thoroughly destroyed with a data crusher. If you wish to securely dispose of your office hardware, contact us to learn about our data crushers. All of them meet NSA specifications in destroying and making hard drives unreadable.
