The cyber risk hiding in federal IT waste: 5 essential steps to secure data destruction

Federal agencies rightly focus cyber resources on protecting existing infrastructure, but decommissioned technology—computers, cellphones, and other hardware —can pose a serious cyber threat if not disposed of properly.

Unlike more visible cyberattacks like ransomware, these breaches often remain hidden, lurking beneath the surface for months or even years before detection.Hostile foreign actors and rogue adversaries seek out these assets to try to steal IP addresses, national security secrets, classified intelligence and even private citizen data. With this information living on discarded tech, decommissioned equipment become a prime target for these bad actors.

A recent 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 government agencies remain a prime 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 ITAD strategy, a good place to start is existing compliance mandates like NIST 800-88. Officially titled “Guidelines for Media Sanitization,” this provides comprehensive guidance on securely erasing or sanitizing data from various types of media to ensure sensitive organization information cannot be recovered.

In an effort to ensure your agency is not taking on unnecessary cyber risk, there are five best practices for creating your data destruction program.

1. Know your inventory

The Department of Homeland Security alone manages over 90,000 issued devices, from hard drives and mobile devices, to niche agency-specific devices like water quality sensors, traffic monitoring cameras and food safety test kits. Agencies need to take inventory of their devices, locations, and level of sensitive information they may contain. Agencies can 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. In alignment with NIST’s guidelines, there are three main approaches: clear, purge and destroy.

• 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, smelting, 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 agency policies

It is critical that the ITAD strategy is embedded within your agency’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 agency’s best practices for handling, transferring and disposing of retired hardware. Employees should also be trained on the importance of secure data destruction and ways to identify the signs that data within retired assets 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 agency is not only meeting security and compliance regulations, but is also running effectively for your agency.

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 agency’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. Our global footprint allows for standardized processes across all of your locations.

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 agency’s broader cybersecurity policies, you can stay ahead of potential breaches and protect sensitive information for the long-haul.

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