In our last blog we wrote about the unfortunate situation where 437 backup tapes meant for sanitization and eventual resale were “lost” enroute to the vendor.  If this was protected information, this would be considered a reportable potential breach, and it would be accompanied with serious costs for breach notification and imminent legal support.  The good news is that this scenario is easily preventable.

What to know:

1. A clear way to reduce risk when replacing and destroying hard drives and back up tape is never provide unsupervised custody of the data for destruction, degaussing, or sanitization to the vendor without having it be encrypted.  In today’s legal realm, encrypting data at rest is the reasonable standard of prevention.
2. If your organization believes there is salvage recovery for old drives or tapes, don’t underestimate the time and cost required for a thorough sanitization.  Hard Drive sanitization requires time as the sanitization software makes multiple passes over that hard drive.  A large SAN unit may require significant hours processing and for quality controls before the drives confidently are prepared to leave your custody.
3. Hackers like to work from their comfortable office overseas or hunkered down in their private lair.  With mechanically destroyed hard drives the possibility for hackers to locate, access, and reconstruct the data is essentially nullified. Mechanical destruction is certain, simple, and fast.
4. Using a third party to destroy, sanitize or degauss hard drives creates a risk that the vendor, or a downstream handler is the hacker…or at the least does something negligent to cause a breach.  Use good judgment when making the vendor selection and get independent assurance so that a $1,000.00 project does not become a multimillion dollar legal battle, and embarrassing PR experience.

AccuShred NW destroys thousands of hard drives, backup tapes, and other media devices each year.  Contact us today and a NAID Certified Secure Destruction Specialist will help you to get your project quoted.

Tags: Hard Drive Destruction