Sanitizing Files

After widespread attacks that spread via shared files that contained malware, the security industry responded with solutions that included tools that would strip the content out of a file and then reconstruct it into a new clean file. This is often called file sanitization. A file sanitization solution can be deployed at corporate gateways that look into a Word doc or a spreadsheet and extract the words, cells, and formatting; then it builds a new clean file with the correct extension. Deciding when to erase files comes back to the organization's data management policies. To implement a data sanitization program at the file level, the organization has to decide what types of data can be stored on what types of devices. Sanitizing a file requires overwriting. Each sector that contains segments of the file is overwritten with ones and zeros pursuant to the desired level of insurance against forensic analysis.