A study by two MIT students highlights the major issues with simply selling old hard drives online.
The study, titled “A Remembrance of Data Passed: A Study of Disk Sanitization Practices,” examined 158 disk drives acquired from computer shops, salvage yards, swap meets, and eBay Inc.’s online auction site eBay.com.
According to the analysis, 117 (74%) of the drives had readable and recoverable old data. On 28 of the drives (17%), there were fully operational operating systems with user data that could be recovered with little to no effort.
Even though 57 (36%) of the disks had just been formatted, the analysis found that they still included old data that could be restored. Other drives produced financial data that had been kept in cached Web pages that had been recovered, while one device that had been reformatted still held 3,722 credit card details in what seemed to be a log file.
Even fresh formatting doesn’t delete the background data. And finding a program to retrieve lost data on a hard drive is extremely easy. The programs are available for free and very lightweight, requiring nothing more than a standard laptop.
Read the report in ComputerWorld magazine: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2580013/mit–discarded-hard-drives-yield-private-info.html
The key to successfully maintaining security where discarded hard drives and other media storage devices are concerned is to seek help from the professionals at Phiston Technologies.
Phiston is your solution to provide disk destruction that meets the NSA’s highest of standards. There are several solutions: a truck we can bring to your facility to destroy hundreds of drives an hour, a mail-in secure service that will provide you with a receipt of destruction, or even machines that can destroy everything you need right in your own facility.
Our team of advisors can also help you put in place a written procedure for handling old drives and more.
