NIST 800-88 Standards For Data Sanitization – An Eye Opener

Summary: Often, this sensitive data remains on devices even after you have discarded it. The National Institute for Standards and Technology has come up with the NIST 800-88 guidelines for proper media sanitization. It ensures that the sensitive data is permanently removed from storage devices when it is not required. In this article we will discover NIST 800-88 standards, importance of media sanitization, explore the primary data destruction techniques, and share best practices for implementing these guidelines in an efficient manner.

What are NIST 800-88 Standards?

NIST 800–88 guidelines were originally published in 2006 and revised in 2012. It is a set of guidelines designed to help organizations effectively and provide a comprehensive approach to media sanitization techniques for various storage devices, especially when handling sensitive data.

What is Media Sanitization?

It refers to the process of rendering access to target data from storage devices to protect against unauthorized access to secured data. The ultimate goal of media sanitization is to prevent data breaches, data leaks, and unauthorized access to sensitive information, mostly when your electronic media or devices are expired, recycled, or being sold.

How to Implement NIST 800-88 Standards?

Let’s explore several factors that organizations should consider when implementing media sanitization techniques to secure sensitive information. Let’s Understand these features to choose the most suitable sanitization method and ensure the complete destruction of sensitive data.

1. Identifying different storage media types, such as SSDs, magnetic drives, and tapes, that require sanitization, considering their varying levels of data sensitivity for future purposes.
2. Select an appropriate sanitization method like clearing, purging, or destroying based on the type of media and their confidentiality level.
3. Now, Execute the chosen sanitization method using proper tools and procedures.
4. Ensure permanent erasure of your data. Confirmation can be achieved by attempting data recovery or utilizing verification tools.
5. Maintain comprehensive documentation of the sanitization process, including the methods utilized, dates, and the personal data involved.

What Do Clear, Purge, and Destroy Mean?

NIST 800–88 guidelines provide three main sanitization methods like, Clear, Purge, and Destroy. Each method provides the features of data destruction and is applicable to different storage media types. This section will explain each of the sanitization methods, focusing on their differences and how they apply to various types of storage media devices.

NIST Clear

It removes data in such a manner that makes it difficult to recover using advanced tools and techniques. It overwrites the data with non-sensitive data, makes it suitable for most storage media and gives a good balance between data protection and media reuse.

The clear method for media sanitization is effective to storage devices such as:

• Floppy disks
• Disk drives
• ATA hard drives
• SCSI drives
• Flash media

NIST Purge

This method provides you with a higher level of security for confidential data by providing data recovery through tools such as overwriting, block erase, and encryption. It’s useful for sensitive information, as it uses physical methods to prevent advanced recovery work.

NIST 800–88 standards recommend specific way for the Purge method, such as:

• Degaussing
• Overwrite
• Block erase
• Cryptographic erase

NIST Destroy

It is the method for physical destruction of storage media that is completely usable and data recovery is impossible. It ensures full data protection for highly sensitive information. However, this method has downsides such as the inability to reuse media and higher costs. Organizations should especially consider these drawbacks and focus on the benefits of alternative methods like Clear or Purge when needed

Responsibility and Verification

The NIST 800-88 standards is recognized for secure data sanitization, but it does not offer the same policies for organizations. Rather, it places the responsibility on key individuals such as chief information officers, information security officers, system security managers, and engineers who handle storage media devices. It gives you the ability of decision-making and considers factors like security classification, and has potential for reuse. Other hand, verification is an important step for maintaining privacy. It’s important to note that it covers not just the equipment and sanitization results, but also the person involved having high skills and abilities.

NIST 800-88 Guidelines For Media Sanitization – Main Guide

In this digital era, the most important aspect for the organization is data security and investing in strong media sanitization methods. Without compromising you should go with effective approach like implementing NIST 800-88 standards for data erasure solutions like SysTools Data Wipe Software tool which ensures the data security and permanently remove sensitive data from their storage devices, protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access.

Does This Tool Follow NIST 800-88 Standards?

Yes, The data destruction tool adheres to the NIST 800-88 standards for data erasure. This ensures data security by permanently removing sensitive information from storage devices, effectively protecting it from unauthorized access. It also provides the option of Quick selection to burn out traces of data recovery. Besides this, it also follows 20+ global standards like ISO, (DoD 5220.22-M) and more.

Conclusion

NIST 800-88 standards were made to protect the data privacy for the organizations and all individuals in the United States. It gives clear protocol for safely erasing data, that helps the organizations to protect sensitive information and fulfill legal requirements. So, by following these guidelines, they can prevent data breaches and securely get rid of digital data.