Thursday Special: Secure your data

Securing data has become an ever-growing worry for professionals and home users alike, but more importantly to the former because of the sums of money involved. But even home users have important data which they wouldn’t like to fall into the wrong hands and if we don’t have access to high-tech equipment or funding specificaly for this type of task, what options do we have at our disposal as home users ? This week’s article is going to find out.

Suppose you have some documents you want to secure, be it something from work or whatever. What measures can we take ? You might want to think about the importance of those documents and how much are they worth to you or your company. The more important they are, the more work you must do in order to secure them. You don’t protect an important database with a simple account password do you ? Let’s say your said documents are worth protecting and thus investing in a few tools.

The most obvious option is to password-protect your account and use Full Disk Encription like PGP DFE to secure the hard disk. That way, no matter who tries to access the hard drive, the information will be secure. If you want to add another layer of security, get a biometric fingerprint reader. You can even create a virtual drive with a software like Steganos. But this also has a couple of disadvantages, mainly if it is your main workstation. The internet is full of trojans and keyloggers and thus can pose a threat. Why bother with cracking the encription when you can simply log the password ? See what I mean ? Even an untrusted network can be dangerous. The second thing is that if the authorities ever want to take a look at what’s stored in there, your hands are tied a bit so better take a look at another option.

If your data is small enough to fit into a USB flash drive, then you can avoid carrying important and sensitive data on your workstation. Regarding USB drives you have a couple of choices:
- a simple but fast drive like the Corsair Voyager GT fitted with TrueCrypt. This little software will encrypt your data AND has the option of adding another dummy encryption in which you put some files. If things go bad, those files will be encrypted and the SECRET encryption will remain untouched. After all, who would think that another virtual drive may be present ?
- the second option is using a hardware protected USB drive like the Corsair Padlock or even better, the Ironkey. These, especially the latter, feature hardware elements which make them particularly hard to break. To make a deadlier mix, add TrueCrypt with the above tips for plausible deniability.

Personaly, I would use a smaller although slower thumbdrive because it is easier to hide to whch I’d add TrueCrypt.You may need to experiement and find out which tools fit you best now that you have some basic guidelines.