Today, with the legal nightmare we live in, you need to protect the sensitive data you have.

Computers today store a lot of private information, both for you and your customers. You can get into a lot of trouble if the courts rule that you have released your customer or staff details, such as financial records and confidential documents. Failing to destroy this information on your computer correctly can lead to severe consequences, such as data breaches, identity theft, and legal ramifications.

Before proceeding, always ensure that any critical data you require is backed up securely.

Data removal

When disposing of old hard drives, simply deleting files or formatting the drive is not good enough. This data can often be recovered by skilled individuals with specialised software. If they do this, you are at risk.

Shredding

One popular and reliable data erasure software is CCleaner, which I have spoken about before. It has a free Drive Wiper tool specifically created for this purpose to erase your data from a hard drive. It works by overwriting your hard drive with ones and zeros. This is claimed to make it virtually impossible to retrieve your information.

Features and Benefits of CCleaner

• Easy to use: CCleaner is relatively easy; if you need help, call me.
• Multiple overwrite passes: The software allows you to choose the number of overwrite passes, with more passes providing a higher level of security. I leave it on a high setting and let it run overnight. I use multiple overwrite passes on the hard drive and use the option of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) 5220.22-M standard. It should be okay with us if it's good enough for them. 

The big plus of this method is that the hard drive can be reused, which means that it can be resold.

I have personally never seen a problem with data security with anyone using this method.

Best Practices for Hard Drive Destruction

For many, this is not good enough, as they feel that their data might still be recovered by experts. The only thing that satisfies them is physical destruction methods.

Our Approach to Hard Drive Destruction

Over the years, we have developed an approach that works well.

Step-by-Step Process

Drilling Holes: We take the hard drive and use a powerful drill to create multiple holes through the casing and platters. This physically damages the drive.

Hammer Smashing: To further ensure data destruction, we place the drilled hard drive in a sack and use a hammer to smash it into smaller pieces. This step helps to pulverize the platters and other components, making data recovery virtually impossible.

Separating: Once smashed, we separate the shattered pieces of each hard drive into two distinct piles, so about half are in one pile and the other half in the other. 

Disposing: We dispose of one pile in our regular bin, and the other is discarded on my way home in a public trash bin far from our work. This added precaution ensures that even if someone were to retrieve the pieces, they would not have the complete hard drive, further reducing the risk of data recovery.

In the 40 years we have been in POS Systems, we have never had a problem with this method.

While this approach may seem excessive, it reflects our commitment to data security.

Ineffective Methods to Avoid

Using a hammer or dropping them 

Hard drives are strong and built to take punishment. This means that even if you smash one with a hammer, there may still be parts of the disk platter left undamaged which may be used for data recovery.

Throwing into the bin

If your rubbish is going to the tip, some people scour the tips, and a working hard drive is worth some money.

Fire or chemicals

Many people suggest throwing hard drives into fire or chemicals at them, neither of which I recommend. These hard drives contain many dangerous chemicals; you do not want to breathe in the fumes.

Conclusion

Today, protecting sensitive data is a critical responsibility. 

It is your legal and social responsibility to keep a lot of information you have confidential and you can get into big trouble if you do not.
I have spoken about this problem before but a few days ago. One of our clients in the middle of processing the weekly payroll system suddenly had to go. While he was gone an employee looked up the pay sheets for the bank and noticed another employee was being paid considerably more than him and complained that his pay was less. Whatever you think of this; I think most of us would agree that an unnecessary problem occurred that should never have happened.

On a computer as anywhere else there is no magic method to stop the invasion of your privacy but there are some points you can do to reduce the problem. The problem in most point of sale retail environments in SMB businesses is that generally anyone in the organisation can get access to everything on your computer. I divide these people into four groups, government officials - who can come in with a court order; coworkers and computer support people - who have access because it's necessary for their work, family and hackers.

That is why we like VeraCrypt. It's free. Your information once it is set up is automatically encrypted before it is saved on the hard drive and only decrypted after it is loaded. The information cannot be read without the use of a correct password. I do warn you it does somewhat slow down processing.

So what we do is set up our users with an encrypted VeraCrypt system. Anything in this until they supply a correct password is unreadable. Once they put in a password, it acts as a normal drive with its own letter, accessible like any other drive but only on that computer so only that computer can read the information. So I downstairs on another computer in the network cannot read that information. When they finish and close VeraCrypt, the information becomes unreadable again to anyone without their password.

VeraCrypt can be set up so secure, few could break it.

Everyone has the right to ask for all the personal information you hold about them. You, however, do not necessarily have to release this information, and if you do you may be able to charge for the work required to produce the information required. What the Australian government has done is created a flowchart to help you make these decisions.