I swore I would not write a Halloween post. When it comes to Halloween I am a Scrooge. Bah, humbug. (Alright, I do have a weakness for candy pumpkins.)
But this press release from Imation was timed to coincide with Halloween week and is meant to scare people out of reselling their no-longer needed backup tapes to services that re-certify them and resell them. The motivation is so transparent this press release belongs right up there with this one, which is too macabre to even discuss. Imation, of course, is a manufacturer of brand spanking new tapes that are much better than those risky dirty old used ones. DarkReading picked up on the press release, but failed to see the self serving aspects of a tape manufacturer discovering data leakage issues with recycled tapes.
Sorry, I am not buying it. Backup and recovery are an essential IT function . The solution to the issue that Imation raises is to encrypt your data when you back it up. Not easy, but there are so many reasons for encrypting data at rest that this is just one more benefit. And then you can safely wipe your tapes and sell them to a remanufacturer.
I do like physical destruction of media. But not when there is an alternative that saves you money, especially when following best practices of data storage and erasure is better than wasting perfectly good physical media.
Richard Stiennon is a security industry analyst. He is currently consulting, speaking and writing on all manner of security topics for IT-Harvest, the IT research firm he founded to cover the security space. He was most recently chief marketing officer for Fortinet. He has served stints at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Gartner, and Webroot Software.
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don't bet against a motivated foe doing data recovery
Richard -
Don't bet against a motivated foe doing data recovery.
As one example of what can be done with paper, see this BBC piece on the Archimedes Palimpsest, where researchers are using multispectral imaging techniques to recover text from a 13th century book that had been scrubbed clean and reused.
If you're serious about document destruction, you shouldn't put up with any less than a heap of slag or a lump of molten plastic as the output of your efforts.
@stiennon Good Morning!
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