And one more cool company

It turns out there is more than one security related company in Finland. We all know and love StoneSoft, the HA firewall vendor. But have you heard of BlancCo.com? Check it out. My friend Markku Willgren just jumped from one to the other.

BlancCo has an interesting offering. We all know the trouble that can be caused by failing to properly wipe disks on computers destined to be trashed or sold. There are lots of cases where that data has ended up in the wrong hands.

I have a story along those lines to tell. I have to obfuscate a lot of details to protect the innocent but here goes.

I once worked for a large organization. I requested an old computer to try out Windows ISA server on and they shipped me a slow desktop Compaq to play with. My roommate at the time needed a computer so he used that as his workstation. The computer had the name of the employee of this large organization written on a sticker on top of it. I knew her. One day he was "poking around" in the file system which had had My Documents erased and found her repository of funny videos and stuff that most people have somewhere on their computers. These were pretty raunchy.

There was also a love letter from one of the top bosses of the large organization in there. It was written to her and described their physical relationship in some detail.

So, case in point. A very embarrasing situation for a lot of people could have occurred due to poor scrubbing of old machines.

Along comes BlancCo. That's what they do. As near as I can tell, they do a kernal level wipe of the drive. From a central management console! Enterprise class, secure data destruction (SDD)with record keeping for compliance. I like it.

Oh, yes. I *did* delete that poor woman's personal files and her secrets are safe with me.