The Best way to erase / destroy data on a hard drive
What do you picture when you think of “destruction?” Hard drives can be destroyed in a variety of ways: pounded with an ax, shredded between metal teeth, dropped from a spaceship, and STILL contain data. There is only one good way to eliminate all data from a hard drive: degauss it. A degausser is a machine that generates a magnetic field for erasing magnetic storage media, such as hard drives and tape. If the gauss is sufficiently more powerful than the coercivity (resistance to being erased) of the drive, the data on the degaussed drive will be totally erased and become forensically unrecoverable. Degaussed drives should also be destroyed. Garner Products destroyers mangle hard drives such that that internal platters are bent and misshapen. This discourages data thieves from attempting to retrieve data from a degaussed drive. Learn more about degaussing and destruction in our latest blogs.
As our world becomes increasingly digitized, the importance of protecting personal data has become more critical than ever. May 25th marks the five-year anniversary of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which has since changed the way organizations within the[…]
Read more
Improper information technology asset disposition costs financial services provider tens of millions Sixty million dollars. That’s how much Morgan Stanley, a global leader in financial services, agreed to pay to clients in January 2022 in a class action lawsuit for[…]
Read more
2021 was a successful year for Garner. We are grateful to our employees, customers, and business partners for believing in our mission of preventing data breaches through proper IT asset disposition. In 2021 Garner saw continued demand for our data[…]
Read more
Think the data is gone? Think again. A data recovery story: “A Powerbook was trapped for two days in a sunken cruise ship at the bottom of the Amazon River. The owner grabbed their scuba gear and dove down to[…]
Read more
(A story about two different CISO data security plans with real-world application of decommissioning hard drives and the threat of ransomware) CISO Andrew Data Security Plan: Focused on Ransomware When Andrew, in California, was appointed Chief Information Security Officer of[…]
Read more
Imagine holding a letter in your hands that says that a hard drive containing your private, protected health information has gone missing. INTEGRIS Baptist Medical Center, Inc., sent such a letter in September 2020. On October 17, 2019 they learned[…]
Read more
To destroy means “to ruin the structure or the condition of.” Picture an ax-wielding man on a wild rampage smashing guitars. The guitars have been broken up into pieces but are still recognizable. Destroy also means to “put out of[…]
Read more
Nothing lasts forever, and this includes data storage devices. When it comes to end-of-life hard drive data sanitization and destroying hard drives, you have options. In order to sanitize a magnetic hard drive of all data to NSA Data Sanitization standards, you[…]
Read more
The New Zero Trust Reality Nothing. Nil. Zero. That’s how much trust you should have in your users, devices, and network when it comes to today’s increasingly dispersed and complex data environment, according to the National Security Agency (NSA). While[…]
Read more
Hiding in Your Old Fax Machine “Many of us get medication at a pharmacy. Recently, I watched as the clerk filled my prescription, which comes in duplicate out of the fax machine. Following data privacy protocol, she very carefully put[…]
Read more