"When you upgrade to a new mobile phone or computer, how you discard your device impacts your security. Most people think that when they reformat their hard drive or restore their mobile device to its factory default settings, everything gets erased -- but that's not usually the case." [emphasis mine]
This statement above is what got my full attention when I watched a short video over at Udemy on the safe disposal of hard drives. This course is part of a very digestible video series on Mobile Cybersecurity Awareness that was created by Eric Schwartzman of the Center for Digital Innovation at Howard Industries. I highly recommend watching it (and the other 11 lectures in this series) as essential learning for every mobile device user. It won't even take up too much of your time; as you can see in the screenshot below, it's less than 4.5 minutes.
In the video, Schwartzman shared that MIT had actually conducted a study using over 160 hard drives that were disposed or resold to determine if these were really cleaned out effectively. They were able to recover confidential information like credit card numbers, medical records, social security numbers. Yikes.
I'm thankful to have learned years ago to always remove the storage units from gadgets before disposing them. But I didn't know then that restoring the devices to factory settings does not really reset them 100%. Schwartzman said that this assumption is largely because of warnings like these:
I truly believed every part of that warning. Yikes times 100.
So how can we effectively dispose hard drives for real? To sum up Schwartzman's recommendations:
Watch the full video at this link: Safely Disposing of Mobile Digital Storage Devices
This statement above is what got my full attention when I watched a short video over at Udemy on the safe disposal of hard drives. This course is part of a very digestible video series on Mobile Cybersecurity Awareness that was created by Eric Schwartzman of the Center for Digital Innovation at Howard Industries. I highly recommend watching it (and the other 11 lectures in this series) as essential learning for every mobile device user. It won't even take up too much of your time; as you can see in the screenshot below, it's less than 4.5 minutes.
In the video, Schwartzman shared that MIT had actually conducted a study using over 160 hard drives that were disposed or resold to determine if these were really cleaned out effectively. They were able to recover confidential information like credit card numbers, medical records, social security numbers. Yikes.
I'm thankful to have learned years ago to always remove the storage units from gadgets before disposing them. But I didn't know then that restoring the devices to factory settings does not really reset them 100%. Schwartzman said that this assumption is largely because of warnings like these:
I truly believed every part of that warning. Yikes times 100.
So how can we effectively dispose hard drives for real? To sum up Schwartzman's recommendations:
- Do not throw away or resell used hard drives.
- Drill 4 holes into the hard drive.
- Remove hard drives from copiers and other devices that use storage units before disposing or reselling them.
Watch the full video at this link: Safely Disposing of Mobile Digital Storage Devices
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