A recent study by researchers at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom found that around 68 percent of disposed USB drives still contained data from previous users.<\/p>\n
For their study the researchers purchased 200 used USB flash drives to determine whether data on the drive had been cleared before being disposed of. In addition to the data that could be recovered from the disposed drives, the researchers found that they could identity the previous owner of the drives from 20 percent of drives, and that on several drives there had been no effort made to delete any data.<\/p>\n
Losing a USB drive is very easy. Whether it falls out of a pocket, is absentmindedly left plugged into a computer, or is swiped by someone with sticky fingers, the risk to your data is quite high. Because of this, encrypting your drive is the best defense to preventing data theft or protecting drives before they are disposed as encrypted data necessarily cannot be read by the new owner.<\/p>\n
If you have not encrypted the data, the least you could do before disposing of USB drives is to format it so that it wipes away any data on the drive.<\/p>\n
To wipe a drive on Windows 10, go to \u2018This PC\u2019, and right-click on the drive you want to securely erase. Click \u2018Format…\u2019 and un-check the \u2018Quick Format\u2019 box, and click Start.<\/p>\n
For Linux and Mac OS X, you can overwrite the entire device with random data using this command from the terminal: dd if=\/dev\/urandom of=\/dev\/sdX bs=1M (You will need to replace \/dev\/sdX with the actual ID of the drive.)<\/p>\n
After this task completes, use the storage manager for your operating system to format the drive to create a new file system, making the drive usable again. Formatting a drive does not, by itself, erase data from a drive.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A recent study by researchers at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom found that around 68 percent of disposed USB drives still contained data from previous users. For their study the researchers purchased 200 used USB flash drives to determine whether data on the drive had been cleared before being disposed of. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8928,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"\n