CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

1.5. Do Not Forget about Data Protection

In this section, you find out about how to secure your data environment from a hacker or malicious user. When securing your systems, you want to protect the systems from a person who damages information or systems with or without intent. You want to be sure to secure your environment from hackers, but at the same time, you want to protect your systems from users on the network who may cause damage without meaning to. Accidents can happen, so be sure to prevent accidents from happening by following the best practices in the following sections.

1.5.1. Destroying data

Most office environments have strict policies in place to help secure confidential information. Shredding paper documents with personal or confidential information is a no-brainer, and computerized data should be no different. A company needs strict guidelines on how to destroy data that resides on computer hard drives.

1.5.1.1. Hard drive destruction

Destroying data that resides on a computer hard disk typically involves shredding the computer hard drive with a huge shredding machine, or destroying the drive another way, such as sanding the platters down to nothing.

I have talked to some customers who used to destroy drives by driving spikes through them, but what they found was that the data around the hole that the spike put in the drive could still be read! These customers now disintegrate the drive in a huge shredder. Other customers sand the drives right down to nothing. ...