Cyber risk hidden in education e-waste: 5 essential steps to secure data destruction

Unlike more visible cyberattacks like ransomware, these breaches often remain hidden, lurking beneath the surface for months or even years before detection. Bad actors seek out this hardware to try to steal personally identifiable information of students and staff, financial information, login-credentials and passwords, and even academic data. With this information living on discarded tech, decommissioned equipment becomes a prime target for cybercriminals.

One survey revealed that 87% of enterprises do not sanitize hardware immediately upon reaching end-of-use, with 31% reporting delays of more than a month. As cybercriminals grow more sophisticated and education institutions remain a key target, every moment counts—delays of days, or even hours, can be the difference between secure data handling and devastating cyber breaches. The solution is comprehensive data destruction, which requires a detailed IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) plan of attack.

When establishing your education ITAD strategy, a good place to start is to review data destruction recommendations outlined through the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). FERPA mandates that educational institutions take reasonable steps to protect the confidentiality of student education data, even during their disposal. This means ensuring that any assets containing student data are securely destroyed in a manner that prevents unauthorized access or misuse.

In an effort to ensure your school is not at cyber risk, there are five best practices for creating your data destruction program.

1. Know your inventory

It was reported that K-12 school districts alone manage an average of 2,591 educational technology tools from school-issued laptops, tablets and storage devices. Higher education institutions, depending on size, usually manage significantly more. Education organizations must take inventory of their devices, locations, and the type of information they may contain. Schools can then better track their lifecycle and ensure no devices are overlooked during sanitization.

2. Choose the right sanitization method

Not all media require the same level of sanitization. Choosing the right method depends on the type of data and the intended disposition of the device. NIST 800-88 classifies data sanitization processes into three categories:

• Clear: Also known as overwriting, this process replaces all existing data with random binary data. It can be used on floppy disk drives, ATA hard drives, SCSI drives, USBs, memory cards, and SSDs while maintaining reusability of media devices. This method is not suitable for damaged devices.
• Purge: This is the heavy-duty cleanup, using advanced techniques like degaussing or cryptographic erasure to ensure data is unrecoverable, even by experts.
• Destroy: The ultimate goodbye—shredding, incinerating, or pulverizing your media into unrecognizable bits. When all else fails, destruction ensures your data is permanently out of reach.

3. Integrate data destruction into other organization policies

It is critical that the ITAD strategy is embedded within your school’s data governance and cybersecurity protocol and policies. This integration ensures that secure data destruction is not just a one-off process, but a continuous and regulated practice. Clear protocols should outline the institution’s best practices for handling, transferring and disposing of retired hardware. Educators and staff should also be trained on the importance of secure data destruction and ways to identify the signs that data within retired media has been compromised.

4. Monitor and audit your ITAD program

Proactive monitoring plays a pivotal role in identifying vulnerabilities and gaps in your ITAD processes—before they possibly escalate into serious cyber incidents. This ensures your institution is not only meeting FERPA and other regulations, but is also running effectively for your school’s unique needs.

5. Streamline the process with an ITAD expert

Partnering with a trusted provider ensures that your organization’s data destruction program is designed, monitored, and executed with compliance, and alignment to your school’s unique needs and priorities. Vendors like Iron Mountain offer a comprehensive approach, covering every stage of the asset lifecycle—from creation and digitization to secure storage and ultimately destruction— eliminating any risk of a break in the chain of custody.

In the rapidly growing cyber threat landscape, don’t fall behind because of technology you’ve left behind. Now is the time to get smarter with your data destruction. By implementing robust ITAD strategies, partnering with trusted experts, and embedding data destruction into your school’s broader cybersecurity policies, you can stay ahead of potential breaches and protect sensitive student information for the long-haul.

Ready to modernize your ITAD strategy? Learn how our unique program can help your agency.