Infosec 2000 - NTSL-Certified Hard Disk Shredder
Blancco has taken the wraps of the Data Cleaner, a hard disk data shredder designed for 32-bit Windows PC environments.
Launching the package on day one of the Infosec 2000 IT security show, which opened in London this morning, the firm said that the 24.95 pound ($40) software is cheaper and more effective than competing applications already on the market.
In addition, the company says, the Blancco Data Cleaner has been thoroughly tested by the National Software Testing Laboratories (NSTL), the independent IT testing organization.
Blancco says that tens of millions of second-hand computer systems are freely available on the open market, and most of them offer easy access to commercially and personally sensitive data.
This is, the firm says, a potential disaster in the making for a business if information falls into the wrong hands, as well as contravening the UK (and other countries') data protection act, which requires all organizations to guard against the unauthorized disclosure of any personal information held on their computer system.
"Most companies forget to consider what happens to their PCs once they have finished with them, and are content to simply reformat their hard drives using the Format, Fdisk, or Delete commands," said a spokesperson for Blancco.
"These commands do not erase information, they merely remove pointers to the files, making recovery with the right utilities a simple task," he said, adding that some organizations, aware of the risks and responsibilities, resort to melting down their old hard drives, or destroying them with a magnetic degaussing machine.
"Both methods are time consuming, expensive, and environmentally unsound, and eliminate the opportunity for resale or charitable donation," he said.
Blancco Data Cleaner, in contrast, is billed as offering a low-cost answer when selling, returning leased equipment, or cleaning PCs of unnecessary and confidential information.
A spokesperson for Eurobourse, Blancco's UK distributor, told Newsbytes that the Data Cleaner package has sold more than 30,000 licenses since it was first released in Blancco's domestic market in Finland.
Since its release, the software is now sold in 10 European markets, and has been translated into local language editions for seven main language markets, including English, French, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, and Hungarian.
Plans call for the software to be translated into a further three to five languages by the end of the year.
Blancco's Web site is at
Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com.