Data Protection
Don't leave Personal Identity on your old PC!
A
study by the Computer Forensics team at the University of Glamorgan, found more
than half the hard drives from disposed computers still contained sensitive
information. It is feared some of the information could be used by criminals.
The data recovered by the university team included staff passwords and national
insurance numbers, a template to print a university degree, confidential company
data and even psychological reports on school-children.
The BBC's Real Story programme has found that bank account details belonging to thousands of Britons are being sold in West Africa for less than £20 each. Read the Daily Telegraph's Newspaper's report or download the article here (PDF)
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The Data Protection Act
The Data Protection Act requires that organisations storing personal data do so securely, and that the data is deleted when it isn't needed any more. As well as breaching the DPA, the lax disposal of hard drives could mean sensitive information falling into the hands of organised technology crime gangs and could be used for identity theft.
The Information Commissioner's Office, the UK government's regulatory office dealing with data protection, said companies had a legal requirement to delete people's personal information from their computers when it was no longer needed.
"It is essential that companies have appropriate procedures in place to ensure that personal records on computer hard drives are rendered unrecoverable when they dispose of computer equipment," said Assistant Commissioner Phil Jones.
"Under the Data Protection Act companies have a duty to store personal information securely and delete it when it is no longer required."
When you to sell or dispose of Personal Computers, you are legally obliged to ensure no personal information is retained on the computer's hard drive. Using the delete facility on the computer does not wipe the information and can be retrieved in the future using special software.
Click here to purchase Disk wiping Software.
Hard Drive Erasure Service
Melton IT Services Ltd offers a Hard Drive Erasure service, eliminating all Hard Drive data to the United States Department of Defence specification for wiping disk storage to guarantee that all data previously contained on that magnetic media is permanently erased. We have already undertaken this type of work for appointed Company Administrators including PriceWaterHouseCoopers.
To ask for a quote or for more information please contact Melton IT Services Ltd
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