A study shows how data as small as 3mm can be deleted from destroyed storage drives. This poses a huge security risk.
What can we do?
And that is, if they really can extract information from such small chunks of a hard drive, what can we do to be sure? Shredding a disc into 3mm pieces is not an easy task, and reducing them is even less so.
This is a problem especially for large companies with important information and need to destroy many hard drives in a short time. At the end of the day, no one will try to extract data from a private user like you or me that nobody cares about.
Anyway there is a very simple method to prevent our information from remaining in a storage unit. You just have to format it and later fill it with any data, file, program, movie or whatever you want that you don’t want to be discovered. Once completed, this disc will have overwritten the previous information and will therefore never be accessible again. At this point, you can discard the drive without even formatting or destroying it. Previous data will not be accessible.
Any other method can fail, as you have already seen, even breaking your disk into a thousand pieces is not the best way to avoid hacking and information theft, hackers will always find a way to access those data.
This is what the CDI (Circular Drive Initiative), a group of solidarity companies who seek to put an end to this method of destroying hard drives, tells us. Also avoiding unnecessary waste and contamination. Although it is believed that from 2028 hard drives will be history and therefore one problem less.
One ITAD supplier said it was destroying five million units because this method was used as “zero risk”. Now they’ve realized that it’s not as effective as they thought, and zero risk isn’t as effective anymore. And it is that 90% of the discs withdrawn from large companies use this route, so far safe.
In any case, the information that we can find in such a small piece is very basic, it could not occupy more than a few megabytes, however, an Excel with data of interest can take up very little space and could be found intact within these 3mmit all depends on the type of file you want to hide.
So now that you know that, if you are planning to destroy your computer or just change your storage drive, keep these small details in mind if you consider that you might have relevant important information inside. We’re sure companies will stop doing this and many hackers will think of new ways to get this sensitive information they don’t want us to know.
