August 20, 2013
Hard Drive Destruction: A Necessary and All Too Often Overlooked Measure
Nowadays individuals and businesses alike often ignore the ever growing need to properly dispose of old, no-longer-needed hard drives in a secure and proper manner.
Cases of identity theft and security breaches caused by documents falling into the wrong hands never seem to be too far away from the headlines, perhaps due to the glamorous, almost James Bond like images they conjure up, but hard drive theft is a phenomenon very much on the rise.
With the vast majority of businesses increasingly turning to storing data on computers as well as paper, the theft of data has become easy target and task for identity thieves. Just a couple of months ago for example, the video streaming website VUDU announced that somebody had broken into their premises overnight and stolen computer hard drives containing almost everything a would be identity thief would need to steal a consumer’s identity, ranging from names and addresses to dates of birth and credit card information1.
While many believe that deleting files or wiping hard drives prior to reselling or disposing of them is enough to prevent any information from being obtained by criminals, this is not the case, and anyone with the technical skill or know how can still access any information which has not been totally eliminated. A study conducted by Harvard University’s Dr. Simon Garfinkel on 236 hard drives purchased on eBay since 2001 found that only 44 of them (19%) had been properly wiped clean prior to their sale. Dr Garfinkel used readily accessible data retrieval programs to recover information from the hard drives, and discovered thousands of credit card numbers – a charitable gift for any data thief2.
The only absolute way to prevent your business’ and your customers’ sensitive information from becoming yet another statistic is to securely destroy your hard drives at the end of their lives.
PROSHRED® is proud to offer On-Site Hard Drive destruction, presenting you with the opportunity to watch your hardware be destroyed in front of your eyes, offering you total peace of mind and ensuring that no sensitive information leaves your premises intact. Capable of shredding up to 500 hard drives per hour, our machines break hardware into tiny fragments and guarantee that all the data is no longer readable. PROSHRED® is also provides you with a dated and detailed Certificate of Destruction upon completion, offering you a hard drive destruction trail should you need it.
Watch our hard-drive destruction process in action!