A study shows how data as small as 3mm in size can be removed from destroyed storage drives. Which is a huge security risk.
What can we do?
And it is that, if they can really extract information from such small pieces of a hard drive, what can we do to be sure? Shredding a disk into 3mm pieces is not an easy task, and getting them smaller is even less so.
This is a problem, especially for large companies with important information and who need to destroy many hard drives in a short time. In the end, no one is going to try to extract data from a private user like you or me that is of no interest to anyone.
Anyway there is a very simple method to prevent our information from remaining in a storage unit. You only have to format it and later fill it with any data, file, program, movie or whatever you want that you are not interested in being discovered. Once complete, that disk will have overwritten the previous information and therefore will never be accessible again. At that point you can throw away the drive without even formatting or destroying it. The previous data will not be accessible.
Any other method can fail, as you have already seen, even breaking your disk into a thousand pieces is not the best way to avoid hacking and information theft, hackers will always find a way to access that data.
This is what the CDI (Circular Drive Initiative) tells us, a group of united companies that seek to end this method of destroying HDDs. Also avoiding waste and unnecessary contamination. Although it is believed that from 2028 hard drives will be history and therefore one less problem.
An ITAD supplier said they were shredding five million units, as this method was used as ‘zero risk’. Now they have realized that it is not as effective as they thought and that zero risk is not so effective anymore. And it is that 90% of the discs withdrawn from large companies use this way, until now safe.
In any case, the information that we can find in such a small piece is very basic, it could not occupy more than a few megabytes, however, an Excel with data of interest can take up very little space and could be found intact within those 3 mmit all depends on the type of file you want to hide.
So now that you know this, if you are thinking of destroying your computer or simply changing your storage unit, keep these small details in mind if you consider that you may have relevant important information inside it. We are sure that companies will stop doing this, and that many hackers will be thinking of new ways to get that sensitive information that they do not want us to know.
