complicated simplicity

Stored somethings, somewhere, that someone else shouldn’t be ever seeing? Are you scared now?

Floppy disks no longer exists. CDRWs are so yesterday. Now, we have thumbdrives (AKA USB drives, USFD and whatever else) ! Small and compact on size and form, yet large and powerful on use and function, the very much overlooked thumbdrives have overtaken the world. I saw a 8GB drive going for $80 at Comex yesterday, and I was just muttering to myself how I spent over $80 last year to get a 2GB one.

Anyway, admit it. Who has lost a thumbdrive or two since you first started using them? ADMIT IT. It’s not all that bad when all you have on your thumbdrives are school work (I pray you have a backup, really), or MP3 files you shared with your cousins. Not so fine if you happen to have naked pictures (or videos!) of yourself or your mate, or if you store sensitive financial and personal information on that handy little thing of wonder.

I was wondering what would happen if I ever lost my thumbdrive. I could potentially expose personal information about myself, my banking history, and open myself wide open to identity theft. It’s not prevalent in Asia yet, but identity theft is a huge thing in Europe, and the last thing I want to end up is to have someone call up my bank and wipe out my savings! It has happened to a friend of mine, but luckily the bank was alert enough to call her to counter-check the incident. I could also potentially lose a lot of confidential company information and client data as well. That thought frightened me, so I started to work through the afternoon, doing what a geek does best: Ensuring data integrity and duplicity along with encryption.

Now, if you have a thumbdrive with sensitive information you seriously don’t want anyone else to be flipping through (I don’t wanna know what you have, I don’t care!) you should really consider encrypting your data. After going through the net the whole afternoon, I feel that this is one of the best methods around.

I hope this helps someone out there. Someone with a secret to hide.

And no, this is NOT an advertorial. I just got scared.