When you get rid of personal, sensitive paper documents, it’s a good idea to shred them to help protect your privacy and prevent identity theft. Similarly, it’s important to secure data erase your personal information from computers (desktop, laptop, or tablet) and other devices (smartphone, gaming console) before you dispose of them.
If you are a business or v, you may also risk loss of client’s personal, sensitive data, intellectual property, legal penalties, and damage to your corporate reputation.
So, what should you do? Take the following actions. Obviously, back up files or data you want to keep by making a copy of your information somewhere else
Reinstalling your operating system, formatting your hard drive or deleting specific files and folders doesn’t ensure your data is gone. In fact, in most cases your data is still completely accessible with freely-available tools. Delete doesn’t mean delete! That’s because common methods of deleting data only remove the directory reference to the data so it’s no longer visible. That’s why computers can restore files from a “recycle bin.” They were never really gone in the first place!
Even using more thorough methods of erasing data or reformatting your hard drive may not provide the protection you need. Files leave physical imprints or shadows on your hard disk and skilled computer hackers can access your confidential data, even if it has been properly deleted or overwritten.
Concept Management use the world’s most highly-certified hard drive wiping software
Blancco ensures your data is completely erased and unrecoverable. Blancco uses military-grade, wiping technology that overwrites your data multiple times using CESG approved wipe patterns, ensuring that your data is unrecoverable, even using the most sophisticated tools.
Blancco is perfect for any situation in which you need to delete ALL the data on your storage drive including data, programs, and the operating system.
Blancco is the world leader in secure data destruction. It allows corporations and government entities to permanently and securely erase data from hard drives, removable media, and mobile devices, providing a cost-effective, secure, and socially responsible way of recycling and retiring computer storage and is the world’s most highly-certified wiping software
Blancco securely wipe hard drives and meets BS: Infosec Enhanced Standard 5 security standard and is approved by CESG and DIPCOG Approved and provides a secure data wipe that is “permanently destroyed as to make any type of forensic data recovery impossible’’ and meets or exceeds all major national and international regulatory and technical standards.
Concept Managements secure HDD erasure and overwriting can:
- Manage your corporate storage hardware end-of-life cycle.
- securely erase hard drive data on computers in branch or remote locations before moving them.
- Erase data centre servers and loose drives
- Secure erase hard drive copy machines/copiers
We are now finding that, to enable maximum resale for redundant and end of life equipment there is a major IT shift from physical destruction to software wiping.
Data security, data breaches and data protection is now becoming part of everyday life. From a personal perspective we want our data looked after, we don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands and we expect the people who hold our data to be equally responsible.
Businesses and the public sector are seen as data controllers and have a duty to ensure that data is protected. Thus choosing the correct certified partner is paramount. This is especially important when disposing of computer equipment and the recycling or disposal of normal and classified hard drives.
Overwriting
Hard drive recycling can be viewed in several ways, overwriting the drives by completely erasing the data so the drives can be reused or physically destruction, which means the drives would go for further recycling to take the drives to its base materials as recyclates.
Overwriting to maximise revenues from used drives
Overwriting essentially means Erasing the drives allows reuse but you should make sure that the drives are completely wiped. Using an CESG approved software will ensure this and will allow a certificate of media erasure to be printed off on successful wipes.
However, you still need a procedure for drives that fail the wiping process. Only physical destruction then will ensure complete data removal.
Physical destruction takes two forms: shredding or crushing, but this is not the end of the process. Once the drives are destroyed they undergo further recycling.
Shredded/Crushed
Once they have been shredded or crushed the drives are then shredded further and chopped into tiny particle sizes. There are then various ways of separating the materials out, including electromagnets, floating off materials in different density liquids, eddy current separators and centrifuges. This allows light metals to be separated from aluminium, the magnets are separated and the circuit boards.