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Pete Jakob IT discussions in business media always seem to cover the same topics: mid-tier businesses and tech; IT investment (too much? too little?); data storage (and the environment); information security; and whether good tech people can be good managers. more...
Pete Jakob IBM Software Group Marketing Manager (UK, Ireland & South Africa)

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Tags Security

Who's filched my files?
It's an old story, but given the raft of security breach stories around these days – from the call centre worker in India offering to sell the credit card details of 200,000 people to the "83,000 email addresses, credit card numbers and online transaction files" found on a "computer recovered from criminals in the US" – it seems a good time to drop a reminder about one other oft-forgotten security area:
discarded hard drives.

John Adey, chief technology officer at Star, explains: "Employees store business information and work related files on their C-drives, but we know from experience that most businesses fail to control access to them. Result: nobody knows what's left on those drives. The implications are grave. We know, for example, that there's a thriving industry in India for salvaged passwords and other credentials from discarded hard drives. These businesses buy discarded equipment with the explicit intention of dredging any legacy data from them - rich pickings for them, no doubt."

So if you're going to get rid of that PC or laptop, says Star, there are a couple of critical things to remember:

1. Harvest data from those hard drives before decommissioning: "Sadly, this doesn't often happen, meaning businesses lose valuable intellectual property at best and put themselves at risk via data protection issues at worst," says Adey.

2. Get a specialist  to wipe the hard drive – "Embedded information should not be recoverable," says Adey.



Posted: 12/10/2006 Comments: 0
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I run a small manufacturing business with 500 employees. Should I be worried about GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) issues? And if so, how can my IT help?

"We did a survey of our customers and, from 100 completed surveys, 80 per cent expected the burden...   more...