18 Online Security Tips to Protect Yourself from Hackers
Act responsibly when disposing of your old computer
You have a new computer—exciting! Just be sure you’re careful when getting rid of your old machine. Stelzhammer says that people have a tendency to forget about their old device once they bring home a new, more powerful computer. Before deciding on the fate of your old computer, make sure you save all the information you might need from the hard drive and store it on a secondary storage device.
Then it’s time to wipe the machine of your personal information. Remember, your old hard drive stores passwords, account data, address books, license keys for software programs, and personal, financial, and medical information.
“Keep in mind that deleting the files or formatting the disk does not erase the actual data on the hard drive,” he says. “It just removes the link to the bits and pieces of information scattered on the drive. These bits and pieces can still be reunited, using various recovering tools, to rebuild the data and make it readable again.”
Here are his recommendations for wiping your old computer clean:
- Use a disk-wipe utility program. Choose software that wipes and overwrites data many times. This method makes that data virtually impossible to recover. Overwriting destroys the data but allows the hard drive to be reused, and it’s currently the only known method of doing so.
- Degauss the hard drive. This process, which demagnetizes your hard drive, is a good option if you can’t access the hard drive via the operating system but know that critical, important, or sensitive data is still stored on it. It’s a powerful data wipe method—and the quickest—but it renders the disk unusable. So before you buy a hard drive degausser, be sure you’re ready to part with the hard drive permanently.
- Physically destroy the hard drive. You can render a hard drive unusable by removing it from your computer and physically destroying it. Try wiping the disk before destroying it, if possible.
Once you’ve put these tips to good use, find out what hackers can do with just your cell phone number—and what to do about it. Plus, learn the steps to take if you’ve been
