What you need to know about retiring an old work computer, that can leave you exposed & what to do about it

Your hard drive in any computer/device is designed to save everything! Information like staff and clients' data, documents, forms, emails, passwords, and work records can easily be recalled long after you retire your work devices. 

Donating old work computers to charities or giving them to staff are standard practices for many small businesses that want to leave a good footprint or avoid unnecessary waste. However, this practice could be putting your clients, staff and business at risk.

Just because you “deleted” it doesn't mean it is gone. Deleting a file just means deleting the shortcuts or pathways to recall the files.

Another term is to “erase” the file. Erasing is a lot like deleting and will still leave the file there, just slightly more challenging to retrieve using a standard working system.

The third most common way is to “format the disk”, again this is not permanently removing the files, just removing the address files, making it harder to locate when searching. 

Many programs are available that can “recover” this data and files, and most computer IT specialists will be able to recover your information quickly, meaning anyone can recover data with the right software.

Protect your clients

Your clients' and staff information is a valuable commodity to be sold on the dark web or used to socially engineer (trick) clients into other scams. Medical information from a risk insurance personal statement, copies of ID, tax returns, superannuation details, investments, bank account information, forms and documents like SOAs can easily fall into the wrong hands.

Right now, you will be thinking, “if these are not ok, then what is the solution?”

How to retire your device safely

There are only two options to retire your computer or device safely, “destroy” them or “wipe” the disk.

Destroying involves physically removing and destroying the disk, using a hammer or axe, applying brute force, and recycling it as scrap metal. The rest of the computer can still be sold, donated or recycled by installing a new hard drive.

The other option is to wipe the disk. A technical process that involves writing zeros (0) and then ones (1) over every part of the disk several (more than three) times each. Making it almost impossible to recover the original data, as any attempt to do so (based on current computing) would result in confusion, as computers need to read a zero or a one, not both in the same character space.

This process takes time and can be a costly alternative, using specialty IT services to do the work.

I'm sure that this isn't the happy solution you were expecting.

However, something you need to know about.

Please share this information with your staff and colleagues, and let's make financial services safer together.

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At The Cyber Collective, we are on a mission to ensure every client in Australia can trust their financial professionals to protect their data safely. We invite you to join us on this mission by ensuring you retire your devices properly to protect the integrity of all stakeholders. 

For more insights on what you can do as a financial professionals firm, visit www.thecybercollective.com.au