Nearly every week we hear a large organisation or Government department has had a major security leak. In 2009 it emerged that the personal details of 1 million banking customers were found on a computer which was sold for just £35 on eBay.

Also in 2009 the Government revealed that information on every prisoner in England and Wales had been on an unencrypted memory stick which had been lost by a private sector contractor.

In 2008 UK IT Recycling Ltd carried out a simple data recovery method on PCs purchased from major computer recycling companies trading on eBay. Out of the 10 PCs purchased 8 contained sensitive data from Schools, Business and a major UK Hospital.
The software used to recover this data is freely available on the internet.

The companies, Schools and Hospitals involved were all given the correct Environment Agency paperwork along with a ‘full data destruction certificate’ all printed by the companies they thought had carried out secure data destruction work as promised.
However instead of performing a secure software wipe that can take upto 5 hours per hard drive the recycling companies had simply carried out a low level format in the hope that body would look.

Responses to a questionnaire sent to many NHS IT support managers revealed a frightening amount of trust in unknown companies contacted through the internet and little knowledge of what happens to the NHS equipment once it leaves the site with one simply saying ‘we donate it to Schools in Africa’ but when asked how do you know it is donated to Schools once it leaves the UK? the reply was ‘I don’t know I just saw the picture on the web site’.

The only way to keep data 100% secure is not to trust it to a 3^rd party in the first place.
All data should be destroyed before any equipment is handed over to anyone regardless of paperwork and promises.

Onsite data destruction should always be carried out and is the only way to ennsure 100% data security. The fastest method is physical hard drive destruction and the most secure method is degaussing followed by physical destruction of the drive.
In the case of DLT, floppies and other magnetic media onsite degaussing followed by granulation is recommended.

UK IT Recycling Ltd can destroy over 1000 hard drives per day at a fraction of the cost you might imagine.