There are far too many companies simply throwing away important documents into the trash thinking that is the end of it, well it’s not. In this day and age, the way technology is heading and growing exponentially, businesses upgrade their computer systems all of the time which also means that their data storage gets moved onto new servers, what happens to the old hard drives?
The Dangers Of Throwing Hard Drives Away
Once techies deploy the new hard drives onto the new company systems the old ones needs to be disposed of properly. Simply throwing them away is just not enough, anyone can install a hard drive into a computer and recover data, even if the hard drive was encrypted!
In 2009 in the UK 300 hard disks were bought at computer fairs and not thrown away or disposed of, you can read the full story here. The people who purchased them found bank accounts, health records, addresses and much more sensitive information. Getting rid of and disposing of your companies hard drives is a must, there are professional companies out there that can actually do this for you.
Shredding Your Documents
We all shred our documents in our company and you should be doing too. There are specialised places that do confidential document shredding on-site. Sometimes using a simple, cheap document shredder is just not enough. There are people called dumpster divers or garbage pickers that will still be able to put certain documents back together, so for the extra sensitive data such as client bank details or anything else, you would need to get rid of that properly and never let it even touch a trash can.
A lot of identity fraud is done by dumpster diving but there are also the very cunning out there and smarter people that will be able to take advantage of your company, for one example lets say you have certain high level employees, the guy goes dumpster diving and finds documents with their names on and maybe even company numbers. The dumpster diver could ring your company and pose as a high level employee and even give the name of someone else high up and pretend they work close together, gaining the confidence of the receptionist he could gain any information he wanted such as pretending to be in a rush and forgetting door or gate codes, the list goes on!
Wrapping it up
We live in a world now where information is passed everywhere, onto clouds which can be synchronized with any device, of course we would not use this type of data storage for the sensitive information but businesses have to be more careful about how they get rid of their information.