Dumpster-Diving is an extremely effective way of gathering a lot of information quickly. This technique does not refer to only steal data; it means to search through the garbage dumps for memory modules of any sorts and then try to dismantle them in search for any bit of information.
Every user who throws away a USB drive could be unintentionally leaking critical information that can finally result in the loss of an organization. This is not the only fear... in a year tens of millions of desktop and notebook computers are disposed off in landfills and junkyards, you may look to it as crap but for a malicious hacker it is no less than finding a treasure.
All this means that we need to dispose off such devices only when we are sure that no one can get to the information stored on the computer. Here are some ways that offer privacy and also don’t charge much for that.
1) Encryption:
This is one of the best means to protect data from being used once the system is discarded. All of us know that simply formatting a HDD does not mean that the data has erased from the disc, it just erases the directory information that indicates where the data is actually stored. Any malicious hacker can make use of freeware and shareware to get to the data that was stored on the disc. For a more efficient line of defense we need to encrypt our data.
Many vendors offer easy and cheap tools for protecting data from theft and Dumpster-diving. These vendors include TrueCrypt Foundation, PGP and Voltage Security. Encryption is widely available and easy to deploy, there is no reason that one might not use some algorithm or another to protect one’s data.
Mobiles and PDA’s provide an even greater risk because they can easily be corrupted with malware or viruses. Encryption may be a good ploy but it too is not 100% safe and a professional might still crack the encryption and get to the data. He can also look for sectors that are being marked as bad or corrupt and check what data was actually stored there.
2) Format disc and fill useless data in it:
Another way to protect your data from fraud is to first format the hard disc and then fill useless data on to it before you dispose it off. A much better way is to remove and reinstall the operating system before filling in the data, this way the OS creates a new directory information onto the hard disc and removes the previous data and stores useless data on top of it. This method is good but like the previous method this too does not provide a 100% security.
3) Destroy the HDD:
This I can term is the best method of all, you can completely destroy a hard drive by two methods, pass a powerful magnet over the disc drive to scramble the magnetic orientation of bits and bytes that stores the actual data on the media in a process knows as degaussing.
Another way is to catastrophically destroy the hard drive. NextPhase can reduce your HDD platters into fragments of a quarter inch or less. This is the minimum size from where a person cannot easily get to the data. This method is good for HDD but not so for flash drives. Flash drives store data in a tiny chip that might escape the destruction process and keep all data intact.
I personally suggest to follow more than one procedure to destroy all the data in your HDD. Follow a combination of steps that are cited above for more protection. These may be able to give you not 100% safety but will get you as close to the mark as possible.
Via: Info World
