A security technician is decommissioning a hard drive that was used to store sensitive financial records. The technician performs a quick format on the drive before sending it to a recycling facility. Which of the following BEST describes the risk of this action?
The data remains on the drive and can be retrieved using data recovery tools.
The drive's firmware is wiped, rendering the stored data permanently inaccessible.
The action complies with the 'Clear' standard of NIST 800-88 for media sanitization.
The quick format procedure sanitizes the drive by overwriting all data with zeros.
The correct answer is that the data remains on the drive and can be recovered. A quick format only removes the pointers to the files in the file system's index (like a table of contents), but it does not erase the actual data stored on the disk. Specialized data recovery tools can easily scan the drive and reconstruct the files, creating a significant data breach risk. Proper sanitization methods, such as those outlined in NIST 800-88 (e.g., overwriting, degaussing, or physical destruction), are required to ensure data is truly unrecoverable.
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What are specialized recovery tools and how do they work?