To securely erase a removable pen/thumb drive or external drive from a MacBook, connect the drive and run Disk Utility directly from Mac OS X.ġ) Choose the Erase Tab, select your formatting options, then click on Security Options.Ģ) Use the slide bar to choose your erase option.

Both of these are very neatly explained at. If you want to securely erase the internal drive of a MacBook before you sell or trash it, you’ll have to (a) boot Disk Utility from a Mac OS X Installation DVD for versions up to and including 10.6 or (b) boot the utility from the OS X Recovery Partition. Backup whatever data you want to keep, and choose one of the following options. Securely erasing drives before disposal makes sense and it’s easy to do using Disk Utility's Erase feature on a Mac. Only degaussing or data destruction are more effective. Secure erase 'writes over' the actual contents of your volume, not just the 'metadata' that describes them. If he feels the improperly disposed data are sufficiently valuable, he can try commercial or custom software to recover encrypted data.Įncryption is good, and without question raises the bar for protecting data. Your encrypted data are vulnerable, too: once physical possession of a drive is obtained, time favors the criminal or attacker. They also employ encryption in ransomware ( CryptoLocker). Less attention is paid to improper disposal, but dumpster diving incidents still expose thousands of individuals to personal identifying or health data disclosure ( 1, 2), as do resale of laptops or drives on auction sites.Ĭriminals are quite comfortable with and routinely use encryption to obfuscate malware. Much has already been written about using file or full drive encryption to protect against surveillance, physical loss or theft. You need only use the breach tool at the US Department of Health and Human services for a sobering confirmation of just how frequently these collectively occur. Physical loss, theft or improper disposal of laptops or removable drives is the most common data breach of electronic personal health information. This is a welcomed change and long overdue, but government, corporate, or criminal collection of data from our online activities accounts for only part of the overall threat to private or sensitive data. Our collective awareness is now sharply focused on issues of third party data collection, surveillance and data exfiltration.

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