Data Destruction and Disposal(Comptia Objective 2.9)

Question 1

What are some examples of Physical Destruction of data?

Answer 1

• Shredder( Heavy Machinery) used for complete destruction of a hard drive/ SSD etc.
• If you are destroying a hard drive or SSD yourself you can simply use a Drill or hammer to drill all the way through the platters of a disk drive or SSD or use a hammer( subtle lol)
• Other option is to use a Electromagnetic device(Degaussing) to electronically destroy a data storage device by removing the magnetic filed this destroys not only the data data but also the electronics of that storage device as well.
• Another more extreme method of physical data destruction would be Incineration where you burn a physical storage device until it is destroyed.

Question 2

What are certificates of destruction and how do they work?

Answer 2

• If you are part of a large organization that doesn’t have time to destroy all of it’s storage devices and their data that you may want to hire a 3rd party to take care of this for you.
• You will want a confirmation that all of your data has been destroyed and this service should include a certificate proving that the data has indeed been destroyed.
• This provides a paper trail of broken data where you know exactly what happened to these storage devices and their data.

Question 3

What is an alternative to Physical destruction of data stored on storage devices?

Answer 3

• Disk Level Formatting( Right type of format is crucial to ensure all of the data was really deleted)
• Low-level formatting is something that is provided by the factory before a device is received and not something done by the typical user nor is it recommended.
• Standard Formatting / Quick formatting
  Sets up the file system, installs a boot sector, clears the master table but not he data. This unfortunately means data can be recovered with the right software.
• Standard Formatting / Regular formatting overwrites every sector with zeros. Available in Windows from Windows Vista and later versions. This method of formatting will make all data unrecoverable.

Question 4

What was discovered during a study in 2019 done by Blancco and Ontrack regarding data security?

Answer 4

• Out of 159 storage devices purchased on ebay, 66 drives had data on them still, and 25 drives had drives with Personal Identifiable Information on them( sad face). This included personal documents, video from a hospital monitoring system and more.

Question 5

What Third Party options are available for File data deletion, full system wipes or physical drive destruction?

Answer 5

• Sdelete by Windows Sysinternals provide File level overwriting without doing a full format of that drive.
• Whole drive wipes to secure data removal is a service available from DBAN(Darik’s Boot and Nuke)