The Risk of Discarded Hardware

The Risk of Discarded Hardware

When hardware reaches the end of their useful lives, most consumers including companies discard the hardware in the garbage. When upgrading to newer technology, most companies quickly delete the hard drives and recycle them and they think they are doing the right thing. However, pressing “delete” is not even close to enough.

Dumpster diving for electronics (E-waste) is becoming more and more popular. Security services and industrial spies are dumpster diving and have the tools and the capability to retrieve your deleted data from multiple sources. When companies sell their computers because they are upgrading, they are at risk of giving away their data. Many companies do not undertake their own data-cleansing operations before giving them away. Forensic data recovery specialists may buy computers from a company as a wholesale lot with the pretense of recycling them. However, their intentions are actually to recover the data from each machine to gather as much of the original data as possible and then sell this data to a competitor.

Companies must reassess their corporate-information disposal processes and invest in the proper disposal methods as preventative risk management.