Data sanitation is the process of deliberately permanently, irreversibly, removing the data stored on a memory device.
Magnetic devices are hard disk, flash disk, CDs, DVDs, and PDA.
A device that is considered "unsanitized" has no residual data and even advanced forensic tools should not be able to recover the data.
Here, are some of the incidents data sanitation is needed: Transfer data within the company If the person has security rights to the data, but this person has to send the computer to another person in the company that has no right or privilege to view the data, your data needs to be sanitized.
If the person sends the computer to another person who has the same right as the sender has then, there is no need to transfer data.
Transfer to a different company When a computer is transferred from one person to another person in a different company or organization, all restricted and confidential data should be sanitized, not unless the management of both sides agree that the other organization has the privilege to view the contents of the restricted data.
All confidential information shall be removed.
Disposal or off site transferring When a computer is to be disposed of or sent outside the organization, all disk shall be sanitized whether or not it has stored confidential information.
No disk, flash drives, CDs, DVDs will be disposed of if it is not sanitized.
PDAs, smart phones, should have data removed first before it is sent to recycling centers or transferred to another person.
Guidelines in Sanitizing Hard Disk Data These guidelines are just your guide to secure data destruction.
It is important to know that the commands your operating system does when deleting data or formatting a drive, do not actually remove the data, it only frees up the space of your hard drive so newly created files will still have room in the disk.
Actual files are not removed it stays in the flash memory space or somewhere in the disk.
There are a number of forensic products sold or available as a free download online which can easily recover removed or formatted files.
Computer File Sanitization This involves removing the confidential files while leaving the operating system and other programs untouched.
A Mac Operating system has built-in secure file deletion called secure empty trash.
When files are in the trash, you will have the option to empty trash - the usual unsecured method of permanently deleting a file or secure empty trash - deleting a file securely by overwriting 0s and 1s to the file.
Other operating systems like Microsoft Windows and Linux do not have this kind of feature so you will need to download and install third-party programs to wipe data securely.
Hard Disk Sanitation and Destruction Disk sanitization involves the removal of the data in the entire disk.
It makes your storage appear in a brand-new state where the disk do not contain any recoverable files.
There is disk wiping tool available pre-installed in some operating system like Linux, but it only wipes data from other disks, not the disk where your operating system is installed.
There are other tools available like when it automatically removes any storage medium attached to the computer when the system boots up.
Physical hard disk destruction is a method where you destroy the hardware itself or use any medium so the contents of the drive are removed permanently.
The destruction may be magnetic or physical.
Magnetic data destruction applies a very strong magnet to erase the files in the disk.
This process also destroys the read/write heads; therefore, it can no longer be used once the disk had undergone magnetic data destruction.
Physical disk destruction actually destroys the disk so it is completely unusable and unrecoverable.
It either takes the disk apart to destroy the platters, toss it in high flames melting it or crushing it into pieces.
Sanitizing PDAs and SmartPhones Sanitizing PDAs and smart phones are not easy.
The vendor software is not guaranteed to sanitized the device's memory.
Therefore, it is not easy to detect if the device's stored information have been permanently removed or not.
An effective way to remove data in these devices is do a cold reset on the device.
This involves pushing a pin in the hole made for cold reset when the power of the device is turned off.
CDs and DVDs CDs and DVDs containing important data should undergo disk destruction first before disposing it.
An effective tool to eliminate data is by inserting it in paper shredders or using a destruction machine, made for destroying disks.
These are some of the things you should do in order to protect your data whether you are a business man or just a normal individual.