Recyling of computer equipment 782



  • What are the requirements to recycle computer equipment especially hard drives under the sarbanes-oxley act.
    I was told that if an outside company took computers to be recycled that they had to provide a certificate that proved that all data on the hard drives were destroyed according to goverment standards. Is this true? What are the requirements?
    If anyone can point me in the right direction, I would appreciate it.
    Thanks



  • No requirement under SOX.
    Good internal controls would dictate ensuring that confidential data was adequately secured, but those would be outside of internal controls over financial reporting under SOX.



  • Why would you let harddrives out of your control without wiping them first? Once a harddrive leaves your control, you no longer control what happens to it. Right?
    It is my opinion that if a company’s executives or accounting staff used the computer asset and it is to be recycled outside of the company… I’d wipe the drive then physically destroy the media.



  • Totally agree with you FCE, you would be nuts to let a hard drive leave the company without being wiped first. That said you don’t let people actually save anything to their C Drives do you 😉
    I worked with one company that took this so seriously that hard drives were actuallly removed from all surplus PCs (they’re cheap to get new ones anyway) and physically destroyed.



  • That said you don’t let people actually save anything to their C Drives do you
    Temp folder can give you alot of useful information 😉
    My company always destroy harddrives manually, which is far better than any wiping process 🙂



  • My company always destroy harddrives manually, which is far better than any wiping process 🙂
    Aye, pretty satisfying to take a hammer to one as well 😄



  • Anti-Forensics: The art and the science of removing sensitive information from all areas of the disk and the ability to provide protection against all methods and equipments of data recovery. Physically destroying the hard drive is the best way to make sure no one retrieves our data.
    When we delete a file, the operating system marks the file with a symbol. We can not see it any more, but it’s still on the hard drive until it’s been written over (again and again) by other files.
    When the hard drive is completely full, the operating system goes to the location of a deleted file. If you don’t run out of space, perhaps your system may never need to write over data you deleted.
    My experience: I have recovered data (from a formatted hard disk) using my laptop and EnCase from Guidance Software. If you wipe the drive again and again, only the labs may help to defeat anti-forensics.
    I like searching the unallocated space, file slack and the swap file.
    The unallocated space potentially contains intact files, remnants of files and subdirectories and temporary files which were transparently created and deleted by computer applications and the operating system.
    Files are created in varying lengths. Windows based computers store files in fixed length blocks of data called clusters. File sizes almost never exactly match the size of one or more clusters. The data storage space that exists from the end of the file to the end of the last cluster assigned to the file is called ‘file slack’. File slack consists of raw memory dumps stored at the end of allocated files, beyond the reach or the view of the computer user.
    Denis, I also need this hammer. I could also use a drill 8O but I don’t want to see one day something like ‘Forum unmasks psycho’ :lol:



  • Additional info:
    I think Sibas (computer forensic company) claims to be able to recover a file that has been overwritten up till 12 times…



  • 12 times, it is possible. 7 times are no more enough to be sure.


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