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Businesses Risk Privacy in Dumping Documents

THOUSANDS of Australian businesses are dumping personal documents into commercial rubbish bins that can be easily accessed by the public and identity thieves.

A survey commissioned by the National Association for Information Destruction showed three in 10 organisations were unaware of their obligations when it came to destroying personal information.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/businesses-risk-privacy-in-dumping-documents-20120429-1xt3g.html#ixzz1tZmoGBZH

What is E-Waste?

What happens when your television, laptop, fax machine or other common electronic products reach the end of their useful life? For many people, it simply means tossing these items in the trash and buying new – and this leads to one of the fastest growing areas of waste in our country: e-waste.

Technology is a rapidly growing industry and as each manufacturer improves their device or releases a faster, more powerful computer, many people and business owners are quick to throw out their older electronics simply to upgrade to the latest and greatest technology available.

Most electronics could be refurbished, reused in another capacity or otherwise recycled, rather than just tossed in the trash. The growing green movement has led many environmentally conscious people to make an effort to use less paper and recycle whenever possible. However, until more people become aware of E-Waste, our increasing reliance on electronics in order to reduce paper is simply replacing one problem with another.

Environmental and Health Concerns of E-Waste

E-waste is often more dangerous than people realize. Consider cathode ray tubes (CRTs), which are found in many televisions: CRTs contain lead, mercury, cadmium, beryllium and brominated flame retardants. A mobile phone contains anywhere from 500 to 1,000 different components and many of these components are also known to contain toxic heavy metals and a variety of dangerous or hazardous chemicals.

When we drop these electronics off at the landfill, the materials can poison our water supply and soil, which then leads to health problems for people and animals in the area. Much of the world’s e-waste is being illegally exported to Asia and Africa, causing major problems in the area. Here are some of the chemicals found in e-waste and their effects:

Brominated flame retardants: These do not decompose easily in the environment, and long term exposure to brominated flame retardants can cause impaired memory function and learning. Pregnant women exposed to brominated flame retardants have been shown to give birth to babies with behavioral problems as it interferes with estrogen and thyroid functioning.

Lead: Found in most computer monitors and televisions, lead exposure leads to intellectual impairment in children and serious damages to human reproductive systems, the nervous system and blood.

Cadmium: Found in laptop rechargeable batteries and other electronic device rechargeable batteries, this can cause damage to kidneys and bones.

Mercury: Found in flat screen monitors and televisions, this damages the central nervous system and brain in people of all ages, but particularly during the early years of development.

Hexavalentchromium Compounds: A known carcinogen, these are used in the creation of metal housings, which are typical of many electronic products.

Minimizing E-Waste

Shredlock Australia is now one of only a few companies in Australia that can offer SCEC (Security Construction and Equipment Committee) endorsed equipment for Hard Drive and media destruction to all levels of security, even to ‘Top Secret’ Australian Government standards reducing whole hard drives to 3mm particles in just minutes.

Shredlock guarantees to recycle 100% of your ‘e-waste’ including monitors, keyboards, mouse, PC boxes, laptops, modems, printers, UPS and most other office electrical equipment.

To book a service or for more information please contact one of our customer service team on 1300 747 338.

They Shred Paper, Don’t They?

Banks and other businesses, like government agencies, have paper documents and other highly sensitive information on them. So, when it comes time to dispose of those documents, they shred them first. Some outsource the shredding to paper shredding companies. Others have their documents incinerated. But what do you do when the documents you need to get rid of are stored on your computer’s hard drive?

Well, for individuals who plan to recycle or re-use their hard drives, one option would be to download free hard drive erasing software.  But that’s for individuals or small-businesses with fewer than 10 employees. But what if your small business has 20, 30 or 50 employees?  Is erasing computer hard drives really the best use of your IT team’s time? Probably not.

Fortunately, it’s not necessary for small-business leaders to spend time wiping clean every hard drive on every desktop or laptop computer that they plan to recycle or discard. Just as you can shred paper documents before throwing them in a recycle bin or dumpster, you can also shred or, more accurately, have shredded, any hard drive that you no longer plan to use for your business.

If you’re going to do that, then you probably should check, double check and triple check to make sure that all relevant or mission-critical information has been transferred and stored elsewhere. The same thing applies to small-business leaders who decide to completely erase their computers’ hard drives. Once that data is gone, it’s gone forever.

Shredlock is also one of only a few companies in Australia that can offer SCEC (Security Construction and Equipment Committee) endorsed equipment for Hard Drive and media destruction to all levels of security, even to ‘Top Secret’ Australian Government standards reducing whole hard drives to 3mm particles in just minutes. Whilst some technology companies claim that hard drive destruction can be achieved by information wiping and although some of these programmes for doing such work are now extremely sophisticated, they still cannot provide the absolute guarantee of total destruction that physical disintegration provides.

Hard Drive Destruction

Purchasing a new computer is a thrill for most people, but deciding how to destroy your old device can be difficult. No matter what job you hold, or if you work from home, hard drive destruction is an excellent way to protect your personal data. Once you have transferred all of your vital information to your new machine, you have no use for your old one.  Shredding the hard drive is an affordable and permanent way to secure a computer’s data.

Companies machine-shred computer hard drives into small pieces. Data hackers or scavengers cannot reconstruct these pieces and the data is totally destroyed.

How do I find a company that shreds hard drives?

The National Association for Information Destruction (NAID) is the international trade association for companies that provide data destruction services in the U.S., Australasia, Europe and Canada. Their website provides many resources for consumers; go to www.naidonline.com

You can also search online for “data destruction” or “hard drive shredding”.

Once you find a hard drive shredding company, ask them these questions:

What happens to the shredded data bits? Make sure they don’t end up in a landfill but are properly recycled.
What documentation do you provide? If you need a certain type of document for compliance, make sure you receive it when the data is destroyed.
What are the costs? Find out about discounts for shredding many disk drives at once, and about weekly or monthly contracts.

Identity crime is a load of rubbish

The Daily Telegraph has reported that the chances of being a victim of identity theft are about 20 times greater than you think.

About 2.6 million people lose money annually to criminals who steal personal information like bank details, date of birth and tax file numbers to perform fraudulent transactions.  In reality, about 780,000 people lose more than $1000 through identity fraud each year with more men than women affected, according to the results of the latest Galaxy Research survey.

Crime Stoppers CEO Peter Price said consumers could reduce their chances of being swindled by more than 80 per cent if they kept personal information secure.

"People are not being cautious enough," Mr Price said.

"They are basically putting private information online and in rubbish bins which is of very high value to certain people."

According to the survey, 40 per cent of identity fraud victims threw bank and credit card statements, social security details and utility bills in the bin without shredding them, while 14 per cent tossed them in the recycling bin.

For more information on this article please go to - http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/identity-crime-is-a-load-of-rubbish/story-fn6b3v4f-1226171452969

Identity Theft Alert

Today Tonight  has reported that Identity Theft is affecting more than four million Australians each year. Identity theft is the world's fastest growing crime, being used to steal billions.

So how does identity theft happen?

In an everyday suburban street, outside an everyday Australian home in the middle of the night, someone rifles through a paper recycling bin.

It’s a form of identity theft from which no suburb in the country is immune. A nightly epidemic where thieves are stealing our personal information right from under our noses, a drive-by fraud service waiting to be picked clean.

“They know, because it's public information which councils have pick-ups on which day, and whether it’s garden waste or recycled waste, and they will cruise through those streets in the middle of the night and go through the garbage bins," Forsyth said.

Two in five Australians put old bank statements and other key personal papers into recycling. Identity fraudsters will return over weeks, compiling piece by piece, until the jigsaw is complete, and then selling that abroad - dumped bank statements, credit card offers, phone bills, which already bear the person’s name and address.

For more information regarding identity theft, go to http://au.news.yahoo.com/today-tonight/lifestyle/article/-/10471251/identity-theft-alert

Why is Security so important when shredding documents?

We feel that Security is a very important step in the process.

Shredlock has revolutionised secure document shredding services in Australia through its unique ‘on-site’ shredding capabilities and its drive to continually improve these services.

By providing ‘on-site’ destruction services the ‘chain of custody’, relating to access to your confidential documentation, is substantially reduced. As a result Shredlock is able to guarantee that your confidential information does not fall into the wrong hands and security is not breached in any way. All our work is done at your premises so that you can be assured that the job is done properly. Security is the key. No documents can leak and nothing can go missing.

For more info view our page that focuses on Secure Document Shredding