When your office moved to the cloud, what did you do with your old server?
A client asked for help finding an old email — they had 10 years of history in Microsoft 365 but needed an email from 11 years ago.
In their store room the old server was sitting under piles of papers & had not been turned on in 5 years. The server did not boot up fully and no one knew the passwords.
How easy it was to get in
Imagine you drop your old server off at eWaste — if someone with a little bit of knowledge recovered it, they would go through the same process we did to have access to all your client data:
- Changing the BIOS jumper enabled the backup BIOS
- Server now booted to Windows, but no passwords known
- Using a USB drive with Offline NT Editor, the admin password was wiped
- Server booted with all files easily readable
- Emails, scanned passports & driver’s licences, company P&Ls were all up for grabs
The right way to retire hardware
After finding the needed email, we used ShredOS to wipe the drives. Only then could the server be delivered to eWaste for recycling.
Got old hardware sitting in a store room with company data on it? We’ll retire it properly. And if the lesson here is bigger than one server, that’s what data loss prevention is for — the other half of the same lesson being that unsupported software is an open door.