Your old hard drive is in high demand, and those that want it would rather not pay for it. About one-third of companies and individuals do not adequately wipe hard drives before discarding them, and those hard drives are like gold to identity thieves. Researchers at BT, a UK telecoms company, Longwood University in Virginia, the University of Glamorgan in Wales and the University in Perth, Australia found tons of personal information, including financial information, on used hard drives they bought at computer fairs, online and at retail outlets. Instead of taking a chance that you didn’t wipe all the sensitive information off your old hard drive, contact Royal Document Destruction for professional hard drive destruction services.
Consumer Hard Drive Destruction
We at Royal Document Destruction also provide consumer hard drive destruction. Even your personal computers have tons of information on them that make it easy for identity thieves to steal your identity. Information you might find on hard drives includes:
- Social Security numbers;
- Bank account information, including account numbers, routing numbers and login information;
- Medical information, including medical records you might download from your doctor, login information for medical accounts, medical account numbers and other medical information;
- Office locations, job titles and dates of employment;
- Birth dates and dates of death;
- Trade secrets;
- Military information, including servicemembers’ personal information, information about other countries, and other top-secret information;
Most people do not encrypt their hard drives, which makes stealing information much easier.
Hard Drive Destruction Certificate
Strong passwords and firewalls are not enough for data security. Encryption and properly destroying old hard drives significantly reduce the risk of someone stealing information from your hard drive. Don’t be under the misconception that when you delete data that it can’t be recovered. Identity thieves have programs that can recover a lot of deleted information. The only way to ensure that the thieves do not get information off of your hard drives is to shred the hard drives.
When you bring your old hard drives to Royal Destruction Services, you will get a hard drive destruction certificate, whether you are a company or an individual.
Because many companies require proof of destruction of hard drives, we give companies and consumers a hard drive destruction certificate so that you can show you did have the hard drive destroyed. Most companies must meet specific security standards, and the hard drive destruction certificate meets those standards.
The destruction certificate includes an itemized list of what you had destroyed. In some cases, the destruction certificate explains the process used to destroy the hard drives.
Contact Royal Document Destruction
Hard drive destruction costs are minimal when you compare it to the cost of having information stolen. If you are a company, you could face stiff fines in addition to lawsuits from your clients who had their information stolen. If you try to destroy your own hard drives, you risk a chance of not properly destroying those drives, or risk the chance of someone being able to recover enough information from sectors that were not completely destroyed to piece together with other information. Instead of taking these chances with your personal information, your company’s information and your client’s information, contact Royal Document Destruction to discuss shredding all of your old digital media.
