Last week I was fortunate to attend the ADISA 2024 Conference at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London. A conference dedicated to those companies that delete/eradicate/destroy computer storage devices so that the data cannot be retrieved.
There were some great speakers, and one that I enjoyed immensely was was Ben Levin from Meta. He explained quite succinctly the various method clearing a disk
1. Formatting a disc drive
This is a simple format of a hard disc, with Microsoft Windows you do get 2 options, the 1st is a quick format, that just releases the space and the 2nd is a full format, which in theory will wipe the data.
With the right software though the orginal data can be recovered and the files reconstituted, so for the average home user this is probably still a good choice, but for a business that may not be the right choice.
2. Writing random data to a disc drive
This in part is like the above, but after formatting the drive, you then write random data to fill up the drive with rubbish, and then reformat the drive to free up the space.
This is usually a good level of protection, but again, if someone has the right software tools, it may be possible to recover the original data. This takes quite a lot of time and expense, and your average hacker is not likely to have access to these tools. So a good choice for most small and medium businesses.
3. Destruction of the disc drive
This option may seem extreme, and can involved not just the physical disc drive but the electronics on the disc drive as well.
This is probably the best security you can have on your hard disc, you can take a sledge hammer to the drive, at Wellis Technology, we drill through the drive and some companies extract the physical disc from within the casing, and shred it down to micron sized particals, definitely safe (you would think).
The first two ways of destroying the drives may seem secure, but again with the right equipment, data could be recovered, it would probably require a State Actor (Government Agency) to do this, but in the case of some governments, this may be worthwhile. I suspect that micron sized particals would be impossible to put back together, but somewhere, someone is thinking about how to work on the biggest jigsaw puzzle ever.
With the advent of the new drives being produced today, many manufacturers are building their drives with built in encryption, the beauty here, is that rather than having to do any of the above, all you need to do when you want to scap your hard disk, is remove the encryption key file on the hard disc and then it should be secure, a quick ask of ChatGPT and with a Quantum computer, it would take over 30 years to break the encryption.
Having spoken to a colleague recently, he mentioned that some governments are demanding backdoors to this latest evolution of the hard disc, so that even when the key file is destroyed, they could access the drives. It may explain how Israel can access locked out iPhones.
For many years, Wellis Technology has decommisioned clients computing equipment including destruction of the data.
