Destroy Your Old Hard Drives It’s More Important Than You Think
Destroy your old hard drives, deleting a file from your desktop computer or laptop doesn’t get rid of it. Items can be recovered by those with the right know-how.
Even wiping your hard drive isn’t fully secure. That just removes the index.
There’s still so much valuable information on an old hard drive.
If you’re upgrading your equipment, you need to destroy your old hard drive to ensure that items on it won’t be recovered. It’s the most secure way of dealing with old hardware.
Think of all the things we have had on our hard drives – banking details, confidential employee files containing names, addresses, phone numbers, and national insurance numbers, business plans…
There’s an extensive list of files which could contain confidential information.
The threats include:
- Data theft for hacking/ID theft – So many people keep copies of passwords on their hard drives, NI numbers, phone numbers, and records of security questions for banking or other secure activities. We all know we shouldn’t – but are you sure there’s nothing on your hard drive which could be used to steal your identity or hack into your systems?
- Business information being made available to your competitors – Business or marketing plans often contain figures and ideas which would be useful if sold to competitors, and there are plenty of unscrupulous people with technical skills out there willing to cash in.
- Emails/staff records which might cause you HR issues if made public – This could relate to disciplinary matters, hiring, firing, or staff appraisals. If you want them to remain out of the public domain, destroy that hard drive.
- Customer information – You may well have detailed analytics about your customers collected by cookies on your website, for example, and information about individual customers from sales records. If those details were made public or used against your customers – like the hacking of credit card details or theft of money from their accounts – the damage done to your business could be devastating. It could also see you facing a substantial fine under the Data Protection Act and having to compensate those customers financially.
Hard drives can be securely destroyed. Taclus Confidential records the asset tag number for each hard drive we destroy on a Certificate of Secure Destruction.
We shred the hard drive and send the waste for recycling, recovering precious materials and rare elements.
We send the rest of the computer for recycling or re-use. Find out about our secure digital media destruction here: https://taclusconfidential.co.uk/shredding-services/.
Our clients have confidence in us because, unlike many other independent providers of shredding services, we have achieved the highest standards in dealing with confidential waste – ISO 9001 and ISO 14001.