Identity theft is on everyones mind nowadays. Most businesses and individuals diligently shred sensitive documents and items containing personal details. However thousands of computers are discarded every year without a thought to what they contain. To the average identity fraudster, a computer is a goldmine of personal and business information, containing personal records, banking details, emails, addresses, photographs...... the list is endless.
Unfortunately, it is not good enough to simply delete this information. There are many data recovery programs available on the internet that would allow a potential fraudster to recover any deleted information.
Apart from taking a sledge hammer to your hard drives (and that isnt even infallible), the only safe way of securely wiping a hard drive is to use what is termed as a multi-pass overwrite technique. This basically uses an algorithm to generate random, information that is written over the whole drive multiple times. This effectively makes it impossible to retrieve any of the original data.
We have recently introduced a hard drive wiping service that uses an algorithm that overwrites data to US Deparment of Defense standards.
Hard drive wiping is available for as little as £25 + VAT per disk. A small price for piece of mind!