A little known truth is that most shredding machines on the market today for small to mid size businesses are not secure. Identity theft is at an all time high, and the number one reason is the very long paper trail each and every one of us leaves behind, or thrown away in our dumpsters. This could almost be the largest catch twenty two spoof of this century. We have to legally keep records for a given amount of time and then we have to dispose of them securely. I'm here to tell you it's not as easy as most small business owners think, and of course the manufacturers don't want you to know this information or they might go out of business.
So now it's time to ask "What is wrong with my shredder?" This cannot be answered without some back ground information. For a long time investigators have used the reconstruction of destroyed paper documents with technologies and forensics that piece together documents from crime scene investigations, but now the technology is in the wrong hands. The main focus on the reconstruction of shredded (or manually torn) paper documents has been primarily concentrated on the reconstruction of text documents, but can be easily applied to images or other types of documents.
Entire forms (e.g. intelligent form analysis, table detection) can be put through analysis. This is done to describe the layout/structure of a document. There is also a skew detection of scanned documents that is performed to support OCR
algorithm
s that are sensitive to skew. Than this paper document analysis is applied to snippets of torn documents to calculate features for the reconstruction.
The reason is simple, not all shredders are created equal. Shredders themselves come in two basic varieties, strip-cut and crosscut. A strip-cut shredder cuts the paper into strips ranging from a quarter-inch to a half-inch wide. Strip-cut machines are more popular because they are usually less expensive; tend to be quite durable and generally shred faster than crosscut models.
Rather than cutting paper into strips, crosscut shredders reduce it to smaller particles-resembling rectangular confetti and measuring approximately one-quarter inch by 1.5 inches-and provide much more security than strip-cut machines. Putting the document back together would essentially be the same as reassembling a giant jigsaw puzzle whose pieces have little color.
In addition, because of the smaller cuts, paper that is crosscut shredded occupies less space than those containing strip-cut remnants. With crosscut shredders, documents are cut in two directions, producing very small particles. Because the particles are so small, they are self-compacting, reducing overall bulk.
Now in case you were wondering how secure East Coast Shredding's Process would be for your company. We have a state of the art hammer mill shredding machine that takes the process even further by also running it through a hammer mill process which means it is pulverized into tiny particles that get pushed through a screen at which point the paper becomes destroyed beyond recognition. There is a scale to rate these levels:
· DIN 32757
o Level 1 = 12 mm strips
o Level 2 = 6 mm strips
o Level 3 = 2 mm strips (Confidential)
o Level 4 = 2 x 15 mm particles (Commercially Sensitive)
o Level 5 = 0.8 x 12 mm particles (Top Secret or Classified)
o Level 6 = 0.8 x 4 mm particles (Top Secret or Classified) (unofficial extension of the DIN 32757-1 standard)
Our process is at level 4, with capability of higher levels according to necessity. We also then go above and beyond when we take our paper to a recycler who turns the paper into a fine powder that can be reused in every day products like asphalt, brake pads, and other items.
So think about the paper trail you leave behind and how securely your business disposes of this paper trail, because users of cheaper shredders can have their privacy violated despite taking precaution. For instance, if a person simply shreds the documents and does nothing else beyond putting it in the trash, all the shredded pieces can be collected by an unsuspecting theft or dumpster diver. Once you put your trash out on the curb you are giving anyone the right to look through and take what they want.
https://www.ads.tuwien.ac.at/wiki/index.php?title=Research/Restoration_of_Destroyed_Paper_Documents&redirect=no
http://spie.org/x648.html?product_id=843687
http://www.identitytheft101.org/
http://www.codeshred.com/news_detail.asp?id=38
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Secure-Your-Shredding/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_shredder
