An employee of a travel agency in Singapore accidentally left a hard drive in a taxi containing confidential client information.
The hard drive in question contained over 200 client records and details of more than 5000 people on a company mailing list along with their home addresses.
The implications for the breach are far reaching and have placed a degree of risk on the business itself as it may be subjected to strict data laws and further actions should the hard drive end up in criminal hands.
As nations look to strengthen data protection laws, companies are being scrutinized by regulators, especially where personal data such as bank details are being kept on local systems. Without proper data protection policies, businesses and their employees can fall victim to potential lawsuits if they have not adequately protected the data they have. This also goes for the use-case where companies are looking to upgrade hard drives on laptops and desktops - and have not securely erased old information.
With more and more data being handled by small as well as large businesses, it is essential that companies and their employees have practices in place that allow for the secure degaussing and erasure of hard drives. Degaussing can save companies millions of dollars in lawsuits by simply erasing disks securely within seconds. Degaussing hard drives magnetically removes the data from the disk, therefore information can’t be recovered.
Degaussing is especially important for recycling where many old hard drives have sensitive data stored, and are simply erased using software. While software can provide a quick, practical erasure solution, it does not remove data from hard drives. In fact, you can learn more about hard drive cleaning with software to see how big the risks are compared to degaussing.
You can discover more about degaussing and explore our range of government approved hard drive degaussers on our website.
If you want to find out more about the degaussing process and are interested in destroying your hard drives for recycling, contact our specialists who can advise you.
