Author: ironcore

Daniel Mattock

Securis believes in our community and the health of its citizens. Team members enjoy participating in an assortment of events to help raise funding and awareness for a variety of causes.

Sales VP Daniel Mattock plans to participate in the JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes this Sunday with his wife and two daughters. Participants in the walk raise crucial funds for the world-wide mission to help cure, treat and prevent type 1 diabetes (T1D).

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that strikes children and adults suddenly. It has nothing to do with diet or lifestyle. If you have T1D, your pancreas stops producing insulin—a hormone essential to turning food into energy. This means you must constantly monitor your blood-sugar level, inject or infuse insulin from a pump and carefully monitor your eating and activity every single day.

Funds raised through Mattock’s family’s site or through the main JDRF site will go directly to support research with the greatest potential to conquer this disease. We’re pleased that Mattock and his family are so community-focused and have partnered with JDRF to help achieve its goal of improving the lives of those affected by type 1 diabetes (T1D). The organization does so by accelerating progress on the most promising opportunities for curing, better treating, and preventing T1D.

With T1D there are no days off, and there is no cure – yet. Mattock, his family, and our community can help change that. JDRF is the one organization with the plan, influence, and ability to lessen the burden of this disease until it no longer exists.

Click here for information on how to help stop T1D.

Knowing the warning signs for type 1 diabetes could save a life! Type 1 diabetes can often go undiagnosed in its early stages because symptoms can be mistaken for more common illnesses, such as the flu. Call your doctor immediately if you or a loved one experiences any of the below symptoms:

• Extreme thirst
• Frequent urination
• Drowsiness and lethargy
• Sugar in urine
• Sudden vision changes
• Increased appetite
• Sudden weight loss
• Fruity, sweet, or wine-like odor on breath
• Heavy, labored breathing
• Stupor or unconsciousness

It is extremely important to receive medical attention—misdiagnosis or leaving your condition untreated can have tragic consequences, including death.

Click here for information on how to help stop T1D.

Does your business have $4 million it can spare if your data is lost or stolen? That’s the average total cost of a data breach in 2015, coming in at $158 for each piece of sensitive or confidential information, according to the latest study from Ponemon Institute and IBM.

That isn’t a spike in cost — the study says the average cost has remained relatively stable in the many years that it has run.

And, the risk you’re facing is more than just having to pay for the cost of the lost data. Companies just like yours that experience a data breach face a bigger financial consequence of lost business and the significant cost it takes to win back trust.

So, you’re spending a lot on your cybersecurity needs, giving IT the tools they need and vetting your vendors before you integrate with new platforms or people. Those are great steps for the beginning of a relationship and the data lifecycle.

Today, however, it’s time to talk about the end of the data and infrastructure lifecycle, where it’s easy to overlook risks: data destruction.

People are at the heart of all breach risks, so we at Securis ensure that everyone on our staff goes through a comprehensive employee background check and is monitored if they might have access to your information. We think this should be a requirement you give to partners who handle your data, no matter where they are in the data lifecycle.

Here are four chief reasons we believe that employee background screenings are an absolute must for all of your data-related partners.

Liability Protection

Insurance policies and lawyers enter the picture almost immediately once a breach is detected. And, if it’s traced back to the staff or partner who was handling data ready for destruction, your policy will likely have requirements for you to remain covered.

One of the biggest requirements is that your data destruction vendors have an audit process so they can track employees who had access and may have led to a breach. One of the biggest trends we’ve seen is the requirement that anyone handling your data destruction be fully vetted – meaning a background check in most instances.

Plus, if you’re able to show your insurer this information, you’ll demonstrate that you took active steps to limit the likelihood of a breach, helping you make a successful claim.

Breach Prevention

While limiting liability is great, it would be even better if you could limit the likelihood that your data was breached at all.

Background checks help us verify employee information and screen out potential issues so that we, and you, don’t have to experience concerns. Most background screening companies say that 40% to 50% of their checks end up flagging substantial errors, omissions, or inconsistencies with what candidates tell potential employers.

We use screenings to ensure you are secure. And, when every employee knows that they are screened and then monitored, it helps reduce the likelihood that a breach attempt will occur. It makes sure everyone is part of the overall commitment to the duty of care when dealing with your sensitive information.

Security Redundancy Additions

Your data destruction company should use multiple avenues to keep your data safe. Every security measure is a useful tool in preventing loss and liability.

Employing background screenings is smart. It should be seen as an additional layer designed to protect you while reminding employees that security is a chief concern.

Reassurance of Ethics and Integrity

And finally, look at the background check from the perspective of a data destruction company like Securis.

We don’t want to hire anyone who poses a threat to your organization or ours. We view the cost of a background check as worth it, especially when compared to the cost of a bad hire who poses a theft risk.

By providing you with information and verifying all our employees are fully screened, we’re saying that we respect your business and your data. Even the most expensive background check on the market is less costly than a bad hire.

Background screenings are just one part of our overall commitment to robust ethical standards and internal integrity.

About Securis’ Background Checks

Ask your partners if they do background checks, and follow up with questions about what information you look for — remember, it’s okay to ask.

Here at Securis, we work with Kroll Incorporated for our data destruction employee background checks and verifications. The New York-based company operates in dozens of countries across the globe and performs searches and data reviews in more than 30 languages. We’ve found Kroll to be a reliable screening partner.

The screening process we use from Kroll considers many different factors, including:

• County Criminal Record Search for the past five years of residency in the counties where the employee lived
• Driving Record Search (motor vehicle record) to verify the driver’s license number, status, state of issuance, and potentially provide information such as full name and physical description, recent moving violations, or accidents
• Federal Criminal National Record Search
• Social Security Number Trace and Verification
• Address and Location Database Information
• U.S. Criminal Records Indicator Search

Securis employees also complete Federal Bureau of Investigation official fingerprint cards. This information, as well as results from background and security checks, is kept in each employee’s file for customer review. It’s our way of protecting what’s important to you.

Americans and their businesses wait for days, stand in long lines, and spend millions of dollars on new equipment every year, tossing out older models to make room. Normally we discuss the security issue that such practices create, but today we want to take a global look at a very different and deadlier problem: shipping all of those used devices to third-world countries where they create areas of toxic scrap.

What’s the Danger?

Starting in the 1990s, the computer truly revolutionized the home and every business in the U.S., and PC models were becoming more disposable and less of a large investment. At the same time, acid leakage and other harmful chemical leaching were starting to be identified, along with their dangers understood by the Environmental Protection Agency.

While the Mercury-Containing and Rechargeable Battery Management Act, passed in 1996 and signed by President Clinton, controlled some of the dangers from batteries, it and the EPA acknowledged that other threats existed and were harder to control.

So, municipalities starting stopping the collection of a variety of waste products, including:

• Cathode ray tubes
• TVs and monitors
• Circuit boards
• And many individual components that contain lead, cadmium, and mercury.

All of these have been identified as threats to your health.

But, today, many of these materials are not processed safely — they are instead just shipped in their dangerous forms to other countries, where the poor often try to earn a living by scrapping and collecting the materials, exposing them to major hazards.

Why Don’t People Recycle E-Waste?

“There is almost nothing as hard to recycle as electronics,” notes James Puckett, executive director of the Basel Action Network (BAN). And unfortunately, that means some people simply don’t recycle while other groups claim to, but then realizing how difficult it is, instead ship electronics to landfills, according to a recent BAN report.

And, in most cases, it comes down to two things: economics and laws.

It’s extremely expensive to properly recycle e-waste. Because there are poor controls over how things are recycled and few audits for those materials, many may claim to recycle electronics while instead paying to ship them off and move the blame and burden to someone else.

Current EPA rules may exempt computer parts and equipment from hazardous waste designations— even though they contain dangerous, hazardous chemicals known to leach into drinking water. This policy makes it legal to export this waste from the U.S. to developing countries.

The EPA has also secured consent with many developing countries to ship our hazardous waste to them, putting it out of sight and out of mind.

We even trade in electronics waste with countries like China and Ghana, where importing dangerous trash is forbidden, but secondary “black” markets arise to buy the waste and recycle it. Other popular markets for our waste include Nigeria, India, and the Ivory Coast.

In these places, mountains of electronic waste surround villages where people hope to make money from leftover components, even as they poison the air, water, and the bodies of these people when they come into contact with the debris.

What Can You Do About It?

The best thing you can do is to take your electronic waste to a facility or company that recycles it and certifies that all of the harmful elements are kept out of landfills, both at home and abroad.

That’s a service we at Securis provide, but, when it comes to protecting people all over the world, we just hope you take it somewhere to be properly disposed of and recycled.

It’s important to do your part because it’s how we safeguard the planet for ourselves, our neighbors, and our future.

You can also support renewed federal legislation and policy on e-waste. We believe that Congressional action is the only way to solve this problem on a national scale, but that there are many things we as individuals can do to solve the problem while it is here in our own backyard.

Make sure your partners properly recycle your e-waste and ask your local representatives to push for smart legislation that would safeguard us all. It’s a proven bipartisan issue because we all care about our world and those who live in it.

Together, we can control our waste and stop putting the lives of others at risk.

A degausser is a machine that disrupts and eliminates magnetic fields stored on tapes and disk media, removing data from devices like your hard drives. The degaussing process changes the magnetic domain where data is stored, and this shift in domain makes data unreadable and unable to be recovered.

Degaussers work on hard drives in most of today’s devices, VHS tapes, cassettes, LTO and DLT tapes, and other storage devices. However, they do not work on compact disks and other optical storage elements.

Degaussing represents one of the best steps to take before destroying or shredding hard drives, by giving you an extra layer of protection against someone accessing your information illegally.

Degaussers in Action

A degausser generates a controlled magnetic field that it uses to remove information. Your equipment all has an Oe rating that lets us know how strong of a degausser is needed to remove the information on that storage medium.

The typical hard drive uses a circular flat piece of metal with an iron oxide or chromium dioxide coating to create and store information. Electrical pulses move through a coil in the head of the hard drive to magnetize part of the metal and position the coating to store information in binary.

Degaussers generate magnetic fields that disrupt the coating and removes the magnetic memory from it. This ends up completely randomizing the data pattern that exists so none of the information is the same.

After a Degaussing

Many of the devices that we can put through a degausser are still able to be used afterward. Generic magnetic storage devices like reel-to-reel tapes and VHS video cassettes are the most likely to be usable after degaussing. The downside is that these are so old that you generally won’t save any money by trying to reuse them due to the upkeep of older equipment and their limited storage.

Today’s hard drives in your servers, computers, laptops, and tablets, plus many backup tapes, are rendered unusable by the degaussing process. The shift in the magnetic domain is permanent and does irreparable damage, which is perfect if you’re looking to delete information for good.

Degausser Terms to Know

If you’re looking at all degaussing service, there are a few things you’ll want to learn and understand. Here are a couple of the biggies.

Oersted

Oersted (Oe) is the measurement of a magnetic field in a vacuum. You’ll find Oe ratings of about 1800 or higher for current tapes, while hard drives can easily reach 5,000 Oe. These energy level ratings tell you how strong of a degausser you’ll need to destroy the data that’s being stored on the device.

Coercivity

You’ll see coercivity used interchangeably with Oersted in many instances, because coercivity is the among of magnetic field that must be applied to reduce a magnetic induction to zero (which kills data on hard drives). Essentially this is a rating of how easy or difficult it will be to demagnetize your magnetic media.

If you see both used together, just remember this: the higher of either term, the stronger the degausser you’ll need to make sure your information is gone.

Do You Need It?

It’s time to ask the big question: should you use degaussing from a service like Securis when getting rid of your old equipment? We always like to say “Yes!” when it’s data that contains any personal information, credit cards, or anything else that could be used to harm your business, customers, or reputation.

There are a few times where you must use degaussing too. If you’re using any information that requires a clearance level, such as “Classified” or “Top Secret” designations, you must follow disposal standards and procedures that include degaussing.

Degaussing also is always recommended for HR companies, financial firms, companies with proprietary information, and anyone who stores health or personal customer information. It is the best way to secure your data and then follow up with a full hard drive shredding just to be safe.

Securis Sales VP Daniel Mattock recently participated in the JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes.  JDRF raises vital funds that power the global movement to help cure, treat and prevent type 1 diabetes (T1D).

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that strikes children and adults suddenly. It has nothing to do with diet or lifestyle. If you have T1D, your pancreas stops producing insulin—a hormone essential to turning food into energy. This means you must constantly monitor your blood-sugar level, inject or infuse insulin from a pump and carefully monitor your eating and activity every single day.

The money that the Securis and Nova NPMA partnership raised (144% of our goal!) will go directly to support research with the greatest potential to conquer this disease. We’re pleased to have joined JDRF to help achieve its goal of improving the lives of those affected by type 1 diabetes (T1D). The organization does so by accelerating progress on the most promising opportunities for curing, better treating, and preventing T1D.

With T1D there are no days off, and there is no cure – yet.  Support of JDRF can help change that. JDRF is the one organization with the plan, influence, and ability to lessen the burden of this disease until it no longer exists.

After the 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara, a U.S. senator organized a nationwide demonstration against environmental pollution. The protest took place on April 22, 1970, and twenty million Americans joined in from all around the country to support more sustainable treatment of the environment. By the end of that year, the first Earth Day had led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts.

Today, that first Earth Day has grown into a global event recognized by more than 192 countries. Each year, communities celebrate Earth Day by planting trees, picking up trash, and responsibly recycling old electronics. Securis is proud to say that this year, we were able to participate in four separate Earth Day electronics recycling events. During these events alone, we were able to collect tens of thousands of pounds of computers, cell phones, toner, servers, laptops, printers, keyboards, and other IT equipment.

Proper electronics recycling is a vital piece of being environmentally responsible. Many materials found in electronic devices are hazardous. When old cell phones and computers end up in landfills, mercury, cadmium, and lead leach into the soil or, when burned, are released into the atmosphere. This impacts the planet as well as having dangerous effects for people, animals, and plants.

By responsibly recycling these materials, the hazardous effects are eliminated.

If you missed our Earth Day events this year, give us a call at 866-509-7250. We offer government agencies and organizations on-site and off-site hard drive shredding and IT recycling services.

For the community, we hold recycling events on the second Saturday of each month:
May 14 | 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
June 11 | 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
July 9 | 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
August 13 | 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
September 10 | 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
October 8 | 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
November 12 | 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
December 10 | 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
For more information on the monthly recycling event and for a list of acceptable items and fees, please visit https://securis.com/monthly-electronics-recycling-event/.

We came across this powerful story as another reminder of why we should care about what happens to our old electronic equipment. Just outside of Ghana’s largest city is a toxic slum located on one of the planet’s most polluted bodies of water. Peter Klein took a group of graduate students to learn more about this place and to meet with Mike Anane, a local journalist who has been following the boys who work in the dump.

“I’m trying to get some ownership labels,” Anane tells reporters. “I’m collecting them because you need them as evidence. You need to tell the world where these things are coming from. You have to prove it. Now, just look,” he says, pointing to an old computer with the label: “School District of Philadelphia.”

Salvageable hard drives are sold on the street, and so Klein and his team purchased several. They found credit card numbers, personal photos, bank account information, and, on a hard drive that formerly belonged to Northrop Grumman, a $22 million government contract.

Even companies and agencies who try to responsibly recycle may unknowingly trust retired computers and phones to somebody who exports. Klein’s students brought some equipment to a facility in the U.S. and were told “What they literally do is dump it into a blast furnace and it burns it all up; and all they get out of it is a bunch of ash and some of the precious metal. Everything else gets consumed, burnt. And that’s an actual fact.”

The students recorded the container numbers and tracked them. Their equipment wasn’t burned but instead sent to Hong Kong where, like in Ghana, people melt the toxic plastic to retrieve the small amounts of precious metal found within circuit boards.

“…the free market will send it to the lowest common denominator, to the worst facilities where people are sitting on the streets just picking through it by hand,” he says. “It’s a myth to think that you can just solve the problem immediately with technology alone.”

(read the full article here)

Each year, hundreds of millions of laptops, mobile phones, hard drives and other electronics are discarded by corporations, government institutions and consumers.  A mere 18% of these are likely to be properly disposed of, which means that an alarming amount of them end up in landfills.  What can your organization do to ensure that your old IT equipment doesn’t end up in a landfill? For starters, ensure that the organization you’re trusting to recycle your equipment is either R2 or E-Stewards certified.

Securis is R2 certified which means that the IT electronics that we handle are stripped of sensitive data and then processed in an environmentally-friendly manner.

• We do not export equipment or its components
• We’ve undergone a rigorous audit by an independent third party who evaluates more than 50 areas of performance
• We’re held accountable to effectively, securely destroy all data on our clients’ storage devices
• We send materials only to licensed and permitted R2 facilities

Every time we accidentally trash a file, it feels like magic when the IT staff can recover it for us in just a few moments. But, as a business owner it’s important to remember that there’s no magic in your IT infrastructure. Data is designed not to go away.

There are multiple systems built to keep information, even when hidden or deleted, alive on your hardware and even in some software. A quick Google search will show hundreds of data recovery tools designed to work with everything from your home PC to your friendly neighborhood server farm.

For today’s cloud systems, that means you’ve got a few extra things to consider.

Cloud Erasure Must Include Physical Servers

The majority of most business is done through cloud services and accounts that hold the reports, files, photos, and other things we need. When you’re done with a service or have ended a project, you might think you only need to delete your account to remove all of the information you were using and storing.

All of your data is still stored on physical servers associated with that cloud service. Deleting your account doesn’t automatically mean you delete the data from the server. Usually, you’re just deleting something that points to your data.

Think of it as removing the numbers from your home. Your house is still there, even though no one on the outside can be 100% certain they have the right address. But, if someone looks hard enough, they’ll still be able to find you inside.

Whenever you’re done with a cloud service or even just storage on a server, get verification that your information is completely gone. We’ve seen cases where virtual storage was used in project A, cleaned, and then used by in project B. If project B were to run a complete recovery on the space where the data was stored, they could potentially recover project A data if the cloud provider hadn’t properly cleared it.

Physical destruction is part of a smart data protection paradigm, and often that includes your servers and hard drives as well as the devices that access them.

What If You’re A Cloud Provider?

At Securis, we want to help promote a culture of complete security when it comes to data and hard drive destruction. For cloud service providers, that means you need to guarantee an extra step and ensure your customers do the same.

Start with a complete destruction of your servers and hardware, and then destroy whatever devices you have that could access these systems and may have latent information. However, destroying a device doesn’t mean you’re done. You need to erase what’s on the cloud and on devices, plus answer customer questions.

Your job is to deliver proof that the data is gone from your infrastructure. It’s always best to remove what you can off of Web and intranet portals, then follow up with physical destruction.

Securis can offer on-site and off-site data destruction services, which is a core part of any data cleanup. We can remove the IT assets you have and ensure that data from these is no longer available, but we recommend you work with any cloud partners to know where else data may be stored.

Together, we’ll keep your data safe and help you build stronger data protection policies.