

Penalties for non-compliance can have serious consequences, identity theft, exorbitant law suites, even criminal prosecution. Increasing data security regulations such as HIPAA, SOX, GLBA, European Union Directives require SECURE data removal. Personal information includes name, social security number, driver's license number, credit card number, financial information, patient information, consumer's personal financial data. There is legislation in place that mandates organizations, public agencies, banks, advocates, etc protect an individual's information. To make sure you comply with governmental regulations and data protection laws Anyone can see the list of sites you have visited on the Internet, the social network profiles you have interacted with, or the applications you have run on your computer. Therefore, your valuable business and financial plans or your personal files and e-mail messages can easily fall into the wrong hands.

When you delete a file, Windows does not destroy the file contents from disk - it only marks it as deleted, waiting for another file to overwrite it. But still, we’ve seen to manyĬSI episodes so we know that sometimes evidence just goes missing.Because formatting the disk or deleting data is not secure It’s cheap insurance if you can imagine what the bad guy could doĬompanies will have full chain of custody documentation to ensure The cost to have the hard drive destroyed varies byĬompany and method, but somewhere around $70 is not unreasonable. Safest way is to take it to a company that specializes in dataĭestruction. So how do we safely “Shred, Disintegrate, Pulverize, or Incinerate…” a hard drive? “Shred, Disintegrate, Pulverize, or Incinerate by burning the device in a licensed incinerator.” The Destroy Method – from the guidelines – Yes, this is the level where the data is obliterated and the hard drive is rendered completely useless for anything but scrap metal and modern art projects. At this point, you may as well go full destroy. Honestly, this is more work than it’s worth. Or take the hard drive apart and run the strong magnet over each of the platters, or disks, inside. Then hit it with a very strong electromagnet, also known as a degausser. Then do a cryptographic erase, which overwrites with all zeros or a pseudorandom pattern. The Purge Method: The guidelines are a bit wordy, so we’ll summarize.ĭo the Clear method. It has to make it hard for even someone with a data recovery lab with all the fancy equipment. It includes using logical methods, like above, and physical methods to make it hard to recover data.
