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We're all out to be ethical and green. Environmental awareness was this years buzz phrase and it's going to continue to grow in importance. Many corporates are using carbon neutral somewhere in their advertising. Recycling of used office equipment, particularly unwanted assets leaves an open door for thieves, fraudsters and the unscrupulous.
Everything from unwiped storage devices to notes on a piece of paper can leave a trail for those who want to exploit your most guarded secrets. A business that decides to move premises and has little care for disposing of their used tape backups or paperwork is looking for a whole lot of trouble.
We've visited the large and the small in terms of businesses. Everything from small engineering works right through to major financial corporates and legal institutions and the one thing we've noticed is the difference between the way they view their obsolete assets. We've been asked to remove tonnes of computers from offices that have moved a couple of streets and seen the DLT and DAT tapes strewn around the skips. Pick up a few of these tapes and run them through a Tape backup unit and chances are you might just strike gold. Similarly, we've been asked to pick up a few pieces of kit, and find that hard drives have been removed and crushed in-house.
We've heard and seen the worst happen. Major corporates unwilling to contact the Police are forced into paying for some information that a deviant has managed to glean from a USB memory stick, hard drive or DLT tape. It's not that hard to do if you have the equipment (which many people now do). Take the increase in identity theft. It's no coincidence that it's increased in line with recycling efforts within the west.
You want to be seen to be green and use your local municipal depot to get your computer recycled, but the depot uses a recycler who takes the container you loaded your PC into and then exports it directly to Africa or India, where it's data is accessed and used at the very least to send out emails to all your friends telling them that they need to enter their eBay details.
Internet fraud is rife and stems in part from the computer hardware we discard every day without a thought for the consequences. No-one, especially businesses want to have their data accessed by third parties. Corporates and Businesses don't enjoy the same level of protection from banks and Governments as the general public, so it's even more important for them to be on their guard. IT Managers should be acting with due dilligence to ensure users in an office/ warehouse return all equipment to their department, where it can be inventoried and tracked. Disposal procedures should be implemented, using vetted recyclers to carry out removals. Data destruction procedures should be implemented either in-house or with a specialist (even the recycler). Corporates and Government bodies should have a contract in place with the Data Destruction Specialist to guard against data theft. Destruction certificates should be issued for any data destruction contracts. Best of all, paying for a recycler to destroy the data means that you're guaranteed a come-back if something goes awry. If you pay for something, there's a contract in place and you have the right to the service you purchased.
