When Morgan Stanley closed two data centers in 2016, the company decommissioned computer equipment through an outsourced data wiping (overwriting) vendor. The risk to ITAD professionals who choose to depend on overwriting as their primary means of data disposal are enormous. Only degaussing (with an NSA approved degausser) or physical destruction is acceptable. As of the Nov 2007 edition of the DoD 5220.22-M Matrix, overwriting is no longer acceptable for sanitization of magnetic media. The marketing “buzz” became so intense that the DoD officially set the record straight in 2007. Many of these companies continue to claim overwriting is DoD compliant on their websites and marketing collateral to this day. At no time was overwriting recommended as an official policy of the Department of Defense-especially for classified data.īut that didn’t stop this “pseudo standard” from being used and promoted by third-party computer recycling and refurbishing companies, IT asset disposition (ITAD) firms and other data disposal vendors. To be abundantly clear, the NISPOM text itself never described any specific methods for sanitization. Devised by Peter Gutmann and Colin Plumb and presented in the paper Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory in July 1996, overwriting with three eraser passes was included as one option for data disposal.īecause of Gutmann and Plumb’s work, early (19) editions of the DoD 5220.22-M, National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM) did include sanitization methods (including overwriting): within the Defense Security Service (DSS) Clearing and Sanitization Matrix (not text) inserted after Section 8-306,” according to Wikipedia. In the 1990s, the early days of data destruction, as people look for secure ways to permanently erase data from hard drives, overwriting was indeed considered. The Defense Security manual specifically disavowed overwriting as an acceptable method of sanitation for magnetic media in the June 2007 edition of DSS Clearing and Sanitization Matrix (C&SM).

It claims that the NISP Operating Manual (DoD 5220.22-M) advocates overwriting hard disk drives as a secure method of media sanitation.

It’s been replaced by modern standards like the NSA/CSS policy manual 9-12 storage device sanitization and destruction manual.īut like the urban legend of the alligators in the New York sewer system, the data wiping myth persists. Wiping standards have been debunked by the DoD.

Dod erase hard drive