AnchorDesk Lounge: POLL: Do you destroy personal data?

by tmoynihan - 6/10/05 1:56 PM

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POLL: Do you destroy personal data?

by tmoynihan - 6/10/05 1:56 PM

Discuss the poll for the Monday, June 13th AnchorDesk newsletter (http://www.cnet.com/2001-6033_1-0.html):

POLL: How do you destroy sensitive data?

1) Shred
2) Pulverize
3) Burn
4) Delete
5) I don't

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Post 2 of 6

(NT) I don't destroy, I encrypt

by SantiagoCrespo

- 6/11/05 8:45 AM In reply to: POLL: Do you destroy personal data? by tmoynihan

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Post 3 of 6

I degauss my harddisks containing sensitive information

by orosberg - 6/13/05 3:23 AM In reply to: POLL: Do you destroy personal data? by tmoynihan

As a local government IT-manager this issue is very important to me.

I have therefore invested togehter with other local governments in the area as well as the police in a degausser. This device destroys the magnetic surfaces on any magnetic media permanently with an extremely strong magnetic field, and we have tested it and found that it is not possible to recover anything from these disks regardless of method.

The only alternative that I can see is to erase the disks with Expert eraser or to send them away.

See http://www.ibas.com/america for more information.

P.s: I'm in no way involved with this company other than as a customer.

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Post 4 of 6

Wouldn't it be easier?

by SantiagoCrespo

- 6/13/05 5:13 AM In reply to: I degauss my harddisks containing sensitive information by orosberg

To perform a low-level format of the harddrive?
It is supposed to set every single cluster to zero, to no information can be recovered.

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Post 5 of 6

Low level format does not help

by orosberg - 6/13/05 5:24 AM In reply to: Wouldn't it be easier? by SantiagoCrespo

IBAS has a forensic department that helps us recover data from employees that are under suspicion for committing criminal actions such as storing child porn.

They say that they can read five layers of information from a harddisk, and a low-level formatting does not prevent restoring data. However, we need the specialized equipment that they have, but it is nevertheless possible.

The expert eraser that they have does rewrite the harddisk with different patterns so many times that it is unrecoverable, and we use this when we want to use the harddisk over again.

Harddisks that we have no use for (old and small) are treated in the degausser. This takes only four seconds, and the disk is forever destroyed along with the data.

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Post 6 of 6