Have you ever considered what you would really lose if you were to lose or have stolen your USB thumb drive. Whether it is dangling from your neck or attached to your key chain you should consider the reality that you may misplace, lose, or have that device stolen from you.
In 2008 I traveled to the Palo Alto California to take part in a review of a security product that was in Beta. After the two day review was completed I made the trek home and returned to life as normal. I soon realized that I was missing my USB thumb drive that I use when traveling. This drive contained my password management program, all of my logins, personal and financial data. It also included VPN information, network and systems information. I called the hotel and to my surprise they had actually found my drive and would ship it back to me.
I was quite relieved by this good news. Now I was not going to have to dig through my bowl of swag drives and build a new travel thumb drive. You may be surprised to know that I was not concerned in the least about the data on the device because I used whole disk encryption to secure the device thus making any data stored on the device completely unreadable to anyone who was to find it.
When you utilize disk encryption any data stored on the device, or in the encrypted areas of the device, will be completely unreadable by anyone who does not have the corresponding password, passphrase, or key that is required to decrypt.
There are many paid applications and a few completely free applications that anyone can use to encrypt data or entire disks or devices. TrueCrypt is one of the freebies. Utilizing a utility like this to secure your device is not only a great idea but could save you a lot of time and money if, or when, you lose your device.
Posted by
Mike Wright
