December CyberCrunch Newsletter
This issue brings with it holiday greetings from our family to yours. We’ll also talk about the importance of proper data destruction on solid state drives (SSDs), and what a drop in total e-waste production means for data security.
Happy Holidays From the CyberCrunch Family
From all of us here at CyberCrunch, we wish you and your family a happy and safe holiday season. Though many of us will be celebrating differently than in years past, we look forward to starting the new year with all of you!
Serdar Bankaci on SSD Data Destruction
Recently, E-Scrap News, a recycling and ITAD trade publication, published an article by CyberCrunch President Serdar Bankaci on the data destruction challenges posed by solid state drives (SSDs). Because SSDs don’t work the same way as mechanical hard drives, the data they contain cannot be destroyed in the same way. Even physical destruction can be a challenge — for example, many SSDs in a 2.5” hard drive form factor have a circuit board that only takes up a small fraction of that space. So drilling or smashing the drive — as one billion-dollar corporation attempted — is likely to totally miss the critical components and leave the data intact.
SSD destruction requires a multi-step process to both destroy the data and verify its destruction. That’s why CyberCrunch has developed a proprietary data destruction system for SSDs — one of only a handful independently certified by NAID for this purpose.
For more information about how our SSD destruction process can protect your data, contact us today.
E-Waste Mass is Down, But Data Risks Are Up
In another E-Scrap News article, a recent study led by several top universities found that the total weight of all e-waste discarded or recycled in the U.S. has declined by 10% from its peak of 1.8 million metric tons in 2015.
This conclusion doesn’t surprise us at all, since the trend has been toward smaller and lighter electronic devices for many years. Flat panel displays have all but replaced CRTs, and even there lightweight LED backlighting has replaced bulky fluorescent tubes. Energy-dense lithium ion batteries have replaced heavy NiCd and NiMH cells. And flash storage has replaced bulky magnetic media even in the server room and data center.
While it’s great for the environment that less e-waste is being generated, these trends also remind us of another trend: the increased threat that comes from discarding a device that still contains sensitive data. Cheap and lightweight flash storage means that more devices than ever store data in one form or another — meaning more devices than ever could be the culprit in a data breach.
To properly destroy data stored on ever-smaller devices, you need a trusted partner with the expertise to identify and handle them. CyberCrunch specializes in finding and destroying data not just on computers and hard drives, but also phones, printers, industrial devices, and other electronics that may contain hard-to-find data storage. Our NAID AAA certified data destruction processes give you peace-of-mind that your data won’t fall into the wrong hands.
