USB Flash Drive Security


A USB flash drive is a great resource for carrying around important documents. However, that portability introduces some problems. The biggest problem is that you could lose your flash drive with all of that important data. In addition, if you use your flash drive on other PCs, you increase the chance that you could get some virus or other malware. Don't worry, if you follow the tips here, you can alleviate these problems.

Encryption

First, let's deal with the problem of losing your flash drive. The easiest thing to do is to encrypt your data. One versatile solution is TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt lets you creat a virtual hard drive within your flash drive that is encrypted. To access the virtual drive, you must enter in a password. The virtual drive can be encrypted in several ways that ensure that your data is protected. As long as you keep your password secure, your data is safe.

Password manager

Speaking of passwords, it can also be useful to have a password manager on your flash drive. When you are on your home PC, Internet Explorer or Firefox will help you manage many of your passwords to websites. But if you have a password manager, it a makes it easy to keep track of your multitude of passwords. Of course, the password database itself is encrypted, and you can keep the encrypted database within the encrypted virtual drive that you created with TrueCrypt. One free and reliable password manager is KeePass.

Virus Scans

If you are using your flash drive on computers other than your own, I would highly recommend taking several virus prenvention steps. The first thing you should do when you plug in your flash drive to a foreign system is to do a virus scan of that system. You can install a program like AntiVir onto your flash drive so that you can perform scans on the foreign system even if it doesn't have its own virus protection. This will help to ensure that your flash drive does not get infected. Even though you take this precuation, I would also advise scanning the flash drive as soon as you plug it back into your regular PC. This will help catch anything that your portable virus scanner did not catch.

Key Loggers

Something else to consider when using a public computer (like in a library), is that it could have a key logger installed. Although some key loggers are software based and can be detected with AntiVir, others are hardware based and cannot be easily detected. If you aren't 100% sure that the computer is safe, do not use that computer for anything that is critical (such as banking). If you have to type in a password for email or website on a public computer, I would advise changing that password as soon as you use a known secure computer again.

Backups

Another problem with USB flash drives is that can easily become corrupted. Usually this is because the drive was removed while Windows was writing data to the drive. The first thing to remember is that you should always use the "Unplug or Eject Hardware" wizard when you remove your drive. To do this, you simply right click on the USB icon in the system tray (bottom right of screen), and select "Safely Remove Hardware." In any case, it is always advisable to backup your data. You can use an automated Robocopy Backup Script or just simply drag and drop a copy of your files to your PC's hard drive. Which ever method that you chose, be sure to do it on a regular basis.

Just following these simple tips will make sure your data is secure and that you can practice portable computing without fear!

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