DoD 5220.22-M Wipe

Media sanitization (also known as data sanitization) is crucial for organizations to prevent leakage of confidential and sensitive data from storage media such as hard drives, USB flash storage, server, etc. Failure to wipe the data when releasing the storage hardware from custody can expose the company’s sensitive information and lead to a data breaches.

Data destruction standards such as DoD 5220.22-M specify a systematic process for the erasure of hard drives and other data storage media by defining the overwriting passes, patterns, and verification methods. The objective of these data wiping standards is to ensure permanent destruction of data from the storage device, leaving no traces behind, before the device is returned, reallocated, resold, or disposed of for recycling.

This blog post focuses on the DoD 5220.22-M data wiping standard and how it is used for getting rid of unwanted, sensitive data from the storage media.