New Devices, Old Problems

 

Technology is a wonderful thing. This has advanced our society, way of life, and enjoyment in so many fields. As a simple example, look at cinema and the movies. Could the current level of CGI be done 15 years ago? Of course not. Also, the form factor for laptops have decreased while the processing power has increased substantially.

With consumers and businesses, the technological advances have increased our demand for new products. This could take the form of watches, fitness trackers, laptops, tablets, or anything with a processor. The replacement of the old technology creates e-waste, requiring recycling.

While this is important there are also risks with this. The information left on these within the hard drives is substantial. Think through the files you have on your hard drive used for personal uses, and all the critical/private information these hold. The files may be photos of your family, tax returns, bank statements, your will or passport, driver’s license, medical information, just to start. If you are a remote worker there may also be work data and documents.

When you replace the old equipment, you need to be sensitive as to this private information. With this in hand, it would be easy enough to work towards identity theft. To mitigate this, you need to sanitize the prior equipment.

The first action item is to back up any information that is important to you. This could be the photos, your resume, or any data you would really miss if you no longer had access to it. This may be done on an external drive, or cloud storage.

If you are logged into any accounts, and had not properly logged out, please do so. This may be email accounts, ride hailing apps, or streaming services. You probably don’t want to share this access or information.

You may have software or services on the laptop. With the new device, you may be able to transfer the software license or service to the new device. This will save you money and the time of re-signing up for these (e.g., AV).

If the device has a SIM or SD card, remove it. There may be documents or other information here you shouldn’t share. This only takes a moment.

Now that you have your important data and information from the equipment, erase the hard drive. To accomplish this, you can do a factory reset.

Lastly, wipe the disk. Granted the factory reset should be fine and work for some people, if you have any concerns, us an app and wipe the drive. Two options for this are Disk Wipe and Active Kill Disk. At this point you are safe to manually destroy the drive. The simplest way is to forcibly apply a hammer to the drive. Remember to wear goggles and gloves.

Thank you.

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Temper Technology with Cybersecurity

Technology is advancing at such a fantastic rate. The pace at time is difficult to manage. These advances have the distinct possibility of vastly improving society. This has been prevalent in the medical field. These have led to improvements in diagnosing illnesses, treatments, machinery, and other attributes.

An issue with this involves the pace itself. As a society, we are prone to run before we can walk. This may be fine in certain instances but not all, including technology. As technology has been advancing at this great pace, the pace has not allowed cybersecurity to adequately develop and be applied at the same pace.

We then have the most cutting-edge technology applied to its subject matter, yet this may not be secure. For instance, over the years there have been numerous advancements with diabetic devices and pacemakers. These have certainly assisted with improving our life, however, there have been multiple issues with these over the years.

In order to ensure the vulnerabilities are free from the equipment, and unauthorized parties are not able to access them, cybersecurity needs to be a requirement as these move through the development gates.