Proposal for Decommissioned PCs

1. Data Theft Prevention
The retiring of old PCs

2. When an old PC is ready to be replaced,
the current policy is to format the drive
and reinstall the OS before donating it to a
charity.
Proposal: The decommissioned PC

3. There is software today which has become
very inexpensive that can recover data
from a hard drive even when it has been
formatted and new data has been written
to it.
Data Recovery

4. Decommissioned PCs, before being
reformatted and a new OS installed should
have their hard drives wiped through a
process known as randomization. The
software to do this is also very inexpensive
or free to use in many cases.
Recommendation

5. Randomization is the process of filling
every block on the hard drive with “zeros”.
The current Department of Defense policy
for acceptable randomization is 7 passes.
This is where the drive is filled and
rewritten to seven times with zeros making
old data unrecoverable.
Randomization

6. Many new programs such as CCleaner, Drive
scrubber, or Eraser to name a few, offer up
to 35 passes or more for protection.
Randomization continued

7. The IT Department should incorporate this
into their practice of decommissioning old
PCs as an additional level of security.
IT Department

8. Many of these types of programs are
available for free or are inexpensive. The
price for data loss could be quite expensive
on the other hand.
Cost Effectiveness