Hey Folks,

I just wanted to let you know that your friends at Total Secure Shredding are now accepting e-Waste at no charge.

What is e-Waste?

E-Waste is all obsolete or outdated computers, televisions, cell phones, printers, PDAs, and multitudes of other electronic devices used throughout the day every day.

Why not just throw this stuff into the regular trash?

There are serious environmental concerns that result from the disposal of e-Waste. Here are just a few of the hazardous elements and compounds that are routinely found in everyday electronics:

• Lead in cathode ray tubes and solder
• Mercury in switches and housing
• Arsenic trioxide as flame retardant
• Polybrominated flame retardants in plastic casing, cables, and circuit boards
• Selenium in circuit boards as power to supply rectifier
• Cadmium in circuit boards and semiconductors
• Chromium in steel as corrosion protection
• Cobalt in steel for structural strength and magnetivity

Ok, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you…

I have no idea what all this means! (I do know that it doesn’t sound like something I’d want seeping into my water supply.)

But here’s the great news, I don’t have to know and neither do you.

You see, I’ve arranged for my buddy Ed Pletner (an electronic waste recycling guru) who runs AVR Recycling to come by my shop every once in a while to pick up all this e-Waste stuff. He then turns around and commoditizes what he can or will just make sure everything is properly recycled with the proper environmental compliance.

And what’s even better, he doesn’t charge me to do all this! (So how does Ed make money? I don’t know that either – I’m just the messenger here!) (He also picks up our shredded hard drives for recycling – that a bonus for your Head Shredding Guy!)

So in any event, I’m not going to charge you either!!

And , if you head on over to Ed’s website, you’ll also see that he is an Asset Management Expert which means he can put together a custom asset management strategy based on your company’s needs; From proper packing and disassemble to eventual asset retirement.

This even can include providing all the necessary logistical services to remove all your no longer needed equipment.

Ed also can use his “inside connections” to arrange to resell your old equipment for its maximum value – Talk about a WIN-WIN!

The reason I’m even getting involved in all this is because I’ve been shredding your hard drives over the last couple of years. During that process, I’ve managed to collect a little mountain of old computers I had no idea what to do with. Now I have a place to get rid of all these old computers.

But, I also noticed that there were quite a few folks who would show up for drop-off paper documents for shredding but also needed to get some old computers recycled. They typically would take these computers elsewhere for recycling.

Now they can drop them here. But there is one caveat…

If you bring in a computer for FREE recycling and don’t want the hard drive shredded, that’s fine, but you will have to sign a liability waiver that Total Secure Shredding is NOT responsible for any data left on the electronics for recycling.

So, starting today, feel free to bring down your old electronics for FREE, environmentally friendly, recycling any time during normal drop-off shredding hours.

Those hours are:

Monday to Friday: 8:00 am to 5:00 pm
Saturday: 10:00 am to 1:00 pm

Here’s the address:

3584 Hancock St.
San Diego, CA 92110

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to give me a call.

Until next time… Keep Totally Secure!

Your friend,

Mike
Head Shredding Guy
(619) 295-5474

P.S. Did you get a load of all those toxic thingys listed above… Who knew?

Finally, an article that puts the argument of Hard Drive Shred Size to bed!

Just a week ago, I about put myself into a coma by trying to explain the impracticality of trying to recover data from a hard drive that had been physically destroyed.

In short… IT’S IMPOSSIBLE

Ok… it is possible… but in the “I’m going to win the Powerball Lottery” kind of way.

It all comes down to how the data on a hard drive is encoded. Each manufacturer encodes their hard drives differently.  Then, to allow for the most data to be stored on these hard drives, the manufacturers are increasing the “areal density” (how tightly the data is encoded) on the drives.

This equates to extremely complex coding unique to each manufacturer.

But isn’t there something that can read the data off a random discarded piece of a hard drive?

In theory… Yes.

There is a process called magnetic force microscopy (MFM) photography that can see the data in its encoded format.

So then all we have to do is decode it – Right?

Well, not so fast.

First, there is the problem of size. Each one of these pictures would have to be saved somewhere for later decoding. For a 20 gigabite hard drive, all these MFM “pictures” would take up approximately 16 terabytes.

Then, here’s the fun part, each picture would then have to “be analyzed by an expert to interpret each bit” of information. Just the idea of this puts the notion of hard drive data recovery in the realms of impossible.

But were not done.

Now we have to know how the hard drive was encoded so we can know how to decode it.

To decode the data it would be necessary to know the manufacturer of the hard drive and the model of the hard drive, in fact. Most likely, one would even need to know the version of the firmware that was used to write the data. Even this information is not enough to decode the data, as one would need access to the manufacturer’s proprietary information concerning how that particular firmware/model drive actually wrote the data to the disk surface.

Still not satisfied that the data on your hard drive is not secure after running it through a hard drive shredder?

So even if we had all the information needed to decode the data, any hard drive that has been physically altered (shredded) will have significant damage to portions of the disks platters that will make the data impossible to retrieve no matter what.

The only response at this point is that data recovery from a physically destroyed hard drive, especially one that is in pieces, is impossible.

So I guess I need to restate my earlier comment…

You probably MORE LIKELY to win the lottery than having the data from a shredded hard drive restored.

To read the full story as published in Storage & Destruction Business magazine, here’s the link:

“Does Size Really Matter?”

As always, if you have any questions about hard drive shredding or have other document destruction concerns, please feel free to give us a call:

(619) 295-5474

Also, I’d love to hear your feedback about this topic in the comments section below.

Until next time… Keep Totally Secure.

Your friend,

Mike
Head Shredding Guy

P.S. I always knew that data recovery from a shredded hard drive was virtually impossible. But that paragraph in quotes above really eliminates the “virtually” part – Don’t ya think?

Fabrice Touree is the now the infamous Goldman Sachs mortgage trader who has suddenly become one of the sole scapegoats for the 2008 financial disaster.

So how does a midlevel 28 year old thrust himself into the limelight as a target for SEC investigators?

Although there doesn’t seem to be any admission by the SEC or Goldman Sachs that Touree was the ringleader who masterminded the creation of billions of dollars of dubious mortgage backed securities, he did do something to put himself into the hotseat.

It appears Mr. Touree simply threw out an old laptop that was later found “discarded in a a garbage area in a downtown apartment building” as indicted in a recent New York Times article.

The laptop was still receiving emails when the eventual user of this “recycled” laptop recognized the name in the emails, Touree, was also a name finding it’s way into news headlines.

An article by the Huffington Post points out that the e-mails received between Touree and his lawyer “discussed how to handle accusations that he and his employer, Goldman Sachs, had played a key role in engineering a near-financial apocalypse.”

This indeed has played out to be quite unfortunate for Mr. Touree since his case is apparently the only one being prosecuted by the SEC.

I would guess that Touree never thought for a second about the open email client on this casually discarded laptop.

Unfortunately, we often forget how much “stuff” is left sitting on those old computers. Most folks are replacing their computer every 2 to 3 years. And let’s be honest, 2 years is not that long ago!

You’re very likely to be using the same online email account, with the same bank with the same bank account number, and still living at the same address.

And, as we see in the case of Mr. Touree, we’re also not very likely to safeguard the information on our computers with passwords.

The above mentioned Huffington Post article goes into some of the current debate over the best way to dispose of the data on our hard drives from using software tools that “wipe” a hard drive to “the most surefire way to discard data” by actual physical destruction.

If you decide to read farther down the article to the comment section, you see the debate rage on about whether reformatting your disk drives is enough, to dropping your computer in salt water, to taking a hammer and giving your hard drive a few good whacks.

Personally, what I recommend is physical destruction. And to take it a step further, shredding so the hard drive is in multiple pieces.

Is this overkill?

Maybe. Although I still get questions as to whether the pieces are small enough.

(I won’t even get into the conversation I’ve had about the NSA and electron microscopes theoretically being able to read individual 0’s and 1’s off hard drive fragments!)

Anyway, when it comes to the secure destruction of hard drives, including my personal hard drives that need disposal, I feel 100% confident when all I have left is hard drive rubble.

Check out the video I took of the very first hard drive I shredded.

The cost of ensuring that the information held on your hard drive will never ever be seen by anyone else again is only $10 per hard drive when you bring the hard drive down to our secure shredding facility. You can stand by our view window while we run the hard drive through the shredder and then take a look at the pieces when we’re all done! (For an additional $10, we will remove the hard drive from your laptop or desktop computer and recycle the computer for you.)

Our secure drop-off shredding facility is located at:

3584 Hancock St.
San Diego, CA 92110

Hours of Drop-Off:

Mon through Fri: 8am to 5pm
Sat: 10am to 1pm

You don’t need to make an appointment. Just drop by whenever you’re ready.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to give me a call: (619) 295-5474

Until Next Time… Keep Totally Secure,

Your friend,

Mike
Head Shredding Guy

I created this cheesy little video 5 years ago and everyone I showed it to hated it…

Had something to do with bullets shooting and saying that we were a “New Sheriff.”

Apparently bullets firing and letting the world know you’re a new company is just the absolute worst things anybody could ever think of doing.

Is it “cheesy” – absolutely

May bullet sounds and holes turn off some people – most likely

Am I worried – NO

Considering all the other stuff found on YouTube, I think this is pretty tame. Goes to show how fast things change in just 5 years.

As a matter of fact, in today’s day and age, the more cheesy and the more it offends the more likely people are going to watch it.

Anyway, I broke this little video (actually a power point presentation) out of the archives, dusted it off, added a little bit, converted it to a video, and away it went onto YouTube.

It’s funny, when I first created this, we didn’t even have a website or phone number!

So enjoy…

Talk to you later,

Your friend,

Mike
Head Shredding Guy
Total Secure Shredding, Inc.

It’s more important than ever to make sure your business, especially if it relates to the medical industry, properly shreds all documents prior to disposal.

On October 4, 2010 the University of Tennessee Medical Center became aware of a “daily administrative report” that was disposed of through the hospital’s regular trash as opposed to proper shredding.

Contained within the report was “certain patient-related information, including the patient’s name and social security number.”

As a result, 8,000 patients had to be notified of the potential privacy breach as required with the HIPAA/HITECH health data breach notification provision.

Early next year (February 18th to be exact), this same breach in patient information could lead to fine’s reaching a potential maximum of $1.5 million. This new HITECH mandatory fine structure kicks into effect if it is determined that the information breach is a result of “willful neglect.”

The UT Medical Center’s West Knoxville billing office also reported a computer stolen in August 2005. The hard drive on stolen computer contained “patient names, Social Security numbers, and birth dates.” Letters from the hospital were sent to the people who’s information was believed to be on the hard drive.

In either event, with the new HITECH laws and fines coming on-line in the coming year, it’s extremely important for health organization to have proper document/information handling and destruction policies in place.

Step 1: Make sure you have a written document destruction policy in place.

Step 2: Make sure all employees are properly trained on your companies policies.

Step 3: Make sure someone at your organization is responsible for implementing and auditing your companies policy and training.

If you ever have any questions with regard to setting up a proper document destruction policy and training program, please feel free to contact us and I’d be glad to help.

Until next time…

Keep Totally Secure,

Mike
Head Shredding Guy