USB device

I recently took a course in which they provided me with a USB drive with the course file on it. The USB drive was so small I was afraid I would lose the tiny device I went home immediately to up loaded the files for safe keeping. This has me thinking what if I did lose the USB drive and someone found it. Who ever found my USB drive would be able to see my course files if they wanted too. After some research I found some ways you can protect the information on your USB drive and protect your computer.

A USB drive is a great way to store information for later use of safe keeping the fact that you can store up to one TB is amazing. However if the information on your USB drive is not protected then it is really useless to have it on the drive. You would be better off saving the information on a laptop drive or a computer as they have password protection and other layers of protection on those devices. In the case when you have sensitive information on a USB drive you can password protect files by using Microsoft office or PDF files as they already have password protection available. You can use a third party such as folder lock it has a few secure options you can use like master password or make wallets which is great for really important information.

You can encrypt part of the USB drive you would have to use a third party in order to complete this process. When you encrypt part of the USB what you are essentially doing is creating a virtual disk within your USB drive. When you down load the program you will be able to install the program into you USB drive. When you plug in your drive you will see another drive separate from your USB drive. When you decide to save information on the virtual drive it will ask you to enter in a password prior to saving the information on the virtual disk. You can find free third party program to complete this process they will allow you a certain amount of free space by using their software any additional space needed you would have to pay for.

You can secure your USB drive by encrypting the whole USB drive. This is a much longer process but very similar to encrypting part of your drive.

Lastly, if you happen to find a lost USB drive in the garbage or while you are walking in the street do not use it. There was a study done in on a university campus where they dropped hundreds of USB drives to see what would happen when someone found the USB drive. Almost half of them were plugged into computers for whatever reason. Hacker can use the USB drives to ruin data on a computer or to open a program allowing them access to sensitive information stored on your computer.

I hope this was helpful as always please leave a comment

Mark Carvajal