The U.S. Department of the Treasury has taken decisive action against the financial infrastructure fueling the global ransomware epidemic.  Per AP News, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has sanctioned Russian national Sergey Ivanov and the payment processor...

If you’re hoping to store digital data on a standard hard disk drive (HDD) for a century, the short answer is no. While most hard drives have an expected lifespan of three to five years with regular use, even a...

A new USB device is attracting attention for offering a “military-grade” solution to a common problem: How to permanently erase sensitive data from a hard drive.  The device appears to be the sole offering of the brand DESTRUCT, which claims...

Hitting a failing hard drive or SSD will not fix it — it’ll make the problem worse. There, we’re done with the article.  What’s that? You need proof that percussive maintenance doesn’t work on data storage devices with extremely narrow...

The Washington Post has confirmed it was the victim of a significant data breach, exposing the highly sensitive personal and financial information of nearly 10,000 current and former employees and contractors.  The attack has been linked to the Clop ransomware...

The average turnaround time for data recovery can range from a few hours to several weeks. We realize that’s a large range — but there are quite a few factors at play, particularly when working with complex scenarios.  We start...

A donor drive is a healthy, functioning hard drive that is used as a source for replacement parts to repair a failed drive (sometimes called the “patient,” though in our laboratories, we usually just use the term “original” drive). These...

Failing hard drives tend to make noises (though not always, as we’ve discussed in other articles). Solid-state drives are more subtle: They may not give any indication whatsoever that they’re near the end of their operational lifespans.  The most...

In simple terms, data corruption occurs when the data within a file or on a storage device is altered from its original state, rendering it unreadable or unusable. You’ve likely experienced this before: a photo that’s suddenly gray or distorted,...

In a recent federal indictment, two employees of the cybersecurity firm DigitalMint were accused of secretly collaborating with one of the world’s most prominent ransomware gangs — and leveraging their positions in a sophisticated extortion scheme. Per the Chicago Sun-Times...