News about Paper shredders
[25/05/2010] Unshredding
Even though extremely costly and time-consuming, the process of reassembling shredded documents, or un-shredding, is possible. This is especially true when the simplest or obsolete shredder models are used; some of these shredders only cut the paper in stripes, which are the same length as the original document and these stripes can be pieced together if an adversary is determined enough. At times, when the documents are fed to the shredder the wrong way and the printed text on them is not perpendicular to the shredder’s blades, pieces of the text can be read even after the papers are shred. Of course, this is mostly true when personal shredders are used since the industrial ones produce randomized and much smaller paper particles.
However, with the advancement of the computer technology, documents that have been shredded with even the most rigorous shredders can be reassembled; instead of collecting all the paper pieces and trying to put them together just like a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces are scanned on both sites and computer software is used in order to determine where all the pieces go. One of the most famous cases of un-shredding attempts is the Stasi archive reconstruction; since all the documents have been passed through shredders and then thrown into garbage bags, they were later collected and a team of German computer scientists developed a computerized program, which is believed to be able to reconstruct at least some of these documents in the course of five years.
Of course, un-shredding is extremely costly and something that most households don’t have to worry about – even though it never hurts to be extra careful, it is unlikely that an identity thief will spend weeks trying to put together bank statements or utility bills. However, the demand for document reconstruction has grown to such proportions that many companies have made un-shredding their core business.
Other articles from this category:
[25/05/2010] History of the paper shredder
[25/05/2010] Shredder innovations
[25/05/2010] Types of shredders
[25/05/2010] What is paper shredder?
