Another option, as opposed to doing nothing is to hide the files you want to 
protect. If someone can't see them in a regular DIR etc then they probably 
won't have the skipps to unhide them.

Right click on folder, select properties then hidden.

Dave


-----Original Message-----
From: ProFox [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ken Dibble
Sent: 07 February 2017 16:35
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [NF] Drop-Dead Simple USB Drive Encryption


>The Kingston Data Traveler series drives have hardware crypto, but 
>they're unlocked using a small program stored on separate cleartext 
>partition. They're not cheap however. so after I lost mine I switched 
>to truecrypt/veracrypt.

About $1 US per GB at Amazon for the Kingston DataTraveler Locker + G3--do-able 
for me, since I typically pay close to the same price for the rubberized 
non-encrypted Corsair drives.

>Given your sole purpose, however, have you totally ruled out automating 
>the backup routine and baking-in file-level crypto?

I have a comprehensive network data backup system that automatically copies 
data from my SAN to a 4 TB USB drive every night, and the drive is taken 
offsite each day.

Not all of the data that needs to be backed up is stored on the network/SAN 
though. Also, I'm a fan of redundant backup.

The reason I'm asking is primarily because one of our big customers--tens of 
thousands of dollars in annual billing--has recently introduced a requirement 
for us to carry "cyber insurance". 
I will avoid the entire rant about the fact that this is a scam, since, like 
many other IT trends that are also essentially scams, this one seems to be 
unavoidably growing in popularity.

The insurance provider wants an assurance that all USB thumb drives are 
encrypted. (It also wants all laptop hard drives to be encrypted, and it wants 
my 4 TB offsite backup drives encrypted.)

So I am evaluating my options, one of which is to avoid much of the problem by 
discontinuing use of thumb drives--at an increase in inconvenience.

I am opposed to essentially turning all of our computers into dumb terminals 
and keeping all the data on the network. What's the point of having computers 
at all then? Plus, I don't like single points of failure. Without thumb drives 
I would have to force people to make even greater use of network shares than 
they do now. And there would be even more people sitting here twiddling their 
thumbs in the event of a network outage.

The laptop thing is especially troubling to me. I can encrypt the data drive on 
a laptop and require users to enter a password to access it, but since the user 
can then set the drive to be automatically decrypted without entering the 
password, and they are likely to do so to avoid the annoyance of having to 
enter two passwords to access the computer, the whole thing is mostly pointless.

As for encryption software that requires the user to be logged in as 
administrator--has it occurred to anyone that it is more dangerous for the 
typical computer user to be running an administrator account on a Windows 
machine than it is for them to have their data on an unencrypted USB stick? Too 
many programmers, IMO, overestimate the ability of their customers to use 
computers safely or to cope with complex interfaces. (Well, that's not the 
right way to put it; it's more like most programmers can't change their 
personal mindsets to encompass the limited abilities of the vast majority of 
the people who have to use the software that they create. Making things simpler 
and safer is too annoying for power-users and CLI-lovers to contemplate.)

The removable backup drives are using a Linux file system, and my consultant 
tells me that there's probably an option to have just these backup drives 
encrypted without also encrypting the data on the SAN. Since there's limited 
access to these drives (just me and my assistant), that's an option I can live 
with.

Thanks for everyone's help!

Ken




[excessive quoting removed by server]

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