SYNDICATES in and around the province are targeting used and discarded hard drives in an effort to steal and resell their sensitive data.
According to Wale Arewa, the CEO of Xperien, many people assume that deleting data from the disks will erase the data permanently, but he warns that unless the disk is properly ‘wiped’ the deleted data can be easily be recovered.
“We live in a world where personal and company information is a highly valuable commodity. It is important that people do everything they can to stop their details from falling into the wrong hands,” he said.
He urged companies and the public to either shred their old hard drives, to use ‘advance digital elimination software’ to permanently remove the sensitive data or to consider ‘degaussing’ – a process that uses a magnetic charge to eliminate data.
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