| Data Sanitization Procedures |
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In the past, only highly skilled professionals could retrieve data from drives that were cleansed by deleting partitions and formatting the drive. Today, data recovery software can be purchased at your local retailer, making the risk of data loss higher than ever. To further complicate matters, products such as fax machines, printers, copiers, PDAs, cell phones, and more may contain confidential data. The vendor you select to perform these services should not only display competency to address all these issues, the procedures should be validated using software that protects against false positives. A site visit witnessing the process and/or a description of services is not sufficient. What happens when you’re not witnessing the process is what matters. The keys to any secure program are documentation and the ability to confirm a validated process was performed on each unit for every job.
Hesstech's Data Sanitization Procedures
All hard drives processed by Hesstech go through a data sanitization process, unless the client specifies other requirements. The standard for any equipment is to perform a validated disk overwrite procedure using software approved by the DOD and capable of performing a wipe compliant with the DOD 5220.22M standard. If the overwrite cannot be performed and verified successful, the hard drive is physically destroyed by shredding. A successful, verified overwrite is one completed with no errors and no bad sectors reported, followed by a verification operation completed with no errors and no bad sectors reported. The tools we use conform to international data overwriting standards, which means Hesstech can provide other levels of sanitization if requested. We also track data sanitization at the media level. Hesstech can track data sanitization per drive, rather than per computer, providing details such as the drive’s manufacturer, make/model, serial number, size, type of overwrite performed, bad sectors reported, who performed the operation, and the success or failure of the operation. For physically destroyed drives, we can track the drive’s manufacturer, make/model, serial number, destruction method, and who performed the destruction. In both cases we still track which drives came from each computer, server, laptop or other device.
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