Advice from the UK Information Commissioner's Office

[StuartR]

I posted this on Facebook, eight years ago. Lots of people still need to hear it today...

I love this advice from a manager at the Information Commissioner's Office...
Look at the device you are using right now and imagine it has just been stolen. Now ask yourself:
1. Was it encrypted?
2. Was it protected with a PIN or password?
3. Do you have backups of all the data?
4. Do you know what to do next?
If any of your answers is NO or Don't Know then go and do something about it NOW, don't wait till it's too late.

[ChrisGreaves]

I posted this on Facebook, eight years ago. Lots of people still need to hear it today...

I agree. Although I do wish that you'd made it into a Poll, or better yet, a multiple-choice test: ; I scored four out of four.
Cheers, Chris

[StuartR]

Anything less than 4/4 is a fail

[ChrisGreaves]

1. Was it encrypted?
2. Was it protected with a PIN or password?
3. Do you have backups of all the data?
4. Do you know what to do next?

Hi Stuart. I think that 1. and 2. are concerned with Security of data and that 3. is concerned with Integrity of data.
How would you classify 4.?
Thanks, Chris

[RonH]

How would you classify 4.?
Thanks, Chris

Umm...

[StuartR]

Security incident management

[BobH]

Great post, Stuart. Thanks for making it.

It embarrasses me no end to have to admit that I failed, utterly.

While we are on the subject, can someone educate me on file encryption? Can it be done automatically when one saves a file or must there be extra steps?

[StuartR]

Typically you encrypt the whole device using built in operating system options

[ChrisGreaves]

... file encryption? Can it be done automatically when one saves a file or must there be extra steps?

With 3rd party applications like Veracrypt one can encrypt a chunk of disk that contains one or more files.

Drives.jpg

On this sluggish old Win7 DELL laptop I set aside 368 GB of disk space and used Veracrypt to encrypt it.
My boot sequence contains a command line for Vercrypt

Code: Select all

"C:\Program Files\VERACrypt\VERACrypt.exe"   /v \Device\Harddisk2\Partition1 /q /L T

which requires me to type in a password. Without that password, the theory is, no one can read any of my 303,657 files in my 33,131 folders.
Shutdown or Restart causes Veracrypt to automatically dismount the encrypted drive, leaving all the data safe from prying eyes.

Once the boot sequence has executed that Veracrypt command and I have entered the password, I have a drive that can be used as T:

Drives2.jpg

Apart from typing in the password at boot time, I need do nothing else about encrypting my data,
Cheers, Chris