Encrypted Data

Data security is a big issue for companies, and no one is untouchable. Even worse, the attacks on companies’ IT systems aren’t diminishing. In February 2007, 2.2 million active duty personnel records were compromised, and unfortunately, many of them were not encrypted.

What’s encryption? It’s when the data is scrambled using a cipher based on a key in such a way that no one can read it unless they know the key to unlock the cipher. With all that’s happening in the world today, you’d think everyone would encrypt their data, especially on laptops, hard drives, memory sticks, and other devices that are easily carried out of the office, but they don’t.

I do security reviews for companies all the time, and I can’t think of a single company that I’ve been to that didn’t have at least one laptop out in the field with unencrypted data. Workstations, especially laptops, need to have full disk encryption in place so if the computer is ever stolen, the thief will not be able to read any of the information. And in fact, none of the companies I’ve worked with yet use something called full-disk encryption on every single one of their laptop systems.

When it comes to data encryption, some people use the encryption tool built into their word processing program. That’s a good start, but it’s not nearly enough. When I travel I sometimes bring my “penetration testing” laptop with me if I’ll need it on that trip. On that laptop I have special “hacker tools.” One of the things I like to do during my presentations to business executives is set a password in my word processing program and then save a file.

Now everyone in the audience believes that data is encrypted, and it is, but only at the bare minimum. I then show the audience how easy it is to crack the encryption code.

The first thing I show them is how they can right click on the file, and then click on the summary tab. By doing this, you can read the first line of the file—even though the file is encrypted. So if you have an employee who you suspect may be up to no good, you can right click on their files, choose the summary tab, and read the first line of their files. Who knows…maybe you’ll see one that has a first line of, “This is how I’m going to sell our information to our competitors,” or something similar that would implicate the employee.

Then I run a password tool program on the computer—something any good hacker has in his or her arsenal—and usually by the first meeting break, the password program has cracked the code and all the encrypted data is available for full viewing.

At that, most executives are amazed. “Wow. I didn’t know you can do that,” is all they’re able to say.

On top of that, have you ever had your computer shut down abnormally, while you were in the middle of working in your word processing program, and when the computer rebooted and you tried to re-open your work, your word processing program displayed the file you were just working on with a message that it automatically saved a copy of your work? That’s an unencrypted copy—even if the original version of the file was encrypted. The danger here is that, if your word processing program saves unencrypted files as “backup copies” while you are working on the file, even though the word processing program deletes the files when you close out normally, the “deleted” unencrypted backup copies aren’t really deleted until they are written over. A malicious hacker could potentially use a data remembrance tool to read those “we thought they were deleted” unencrypted backup copies of your confidential information.

There’s also something in most computer systems called a paging file. It’s a way that the computer stores information about what you are working on “right then” even if you don’t have enough “chip memory” installed in your computer to process multiple and/or large programs. This way your computer doesn’t have to totally rely on just the chip memory you have installed. In other words, it sets aside part of the hard drive and pretends that it’s chip memory too. If your confidential document gets copied to the paging file while you are editing the confidential file, then that information gets stored in that paging file in an unencrypted manner.

So even if you use the built in encryption feature of your word processing program, there are still all these copies of your files available. That’s why you need what’s called full-disk encryption. Quite simply, it encrypts everything on your drive.

Many people say they don’t use full-disk encryption tools because they think it’s expensive. Well, it’s not expensive at all. I have full-disk encryption that came included for free with my laptop. Some people also believe that security is very difficult to configure. No. Enabling full-disk encryption only adds about forty-five seconds to your computer’s setup once the IT professional knows the procedure. It’s very easy.

Other people say, “Once you use full-disk encryption, it becomes almost impossible for the end user to use the computer.” That was true at one point. But now, if I want to lock my laptop, all I have to do is use the Windows L key combination and the computer locks, or I can just set the computer to lock automatically if I walk away for very long. Then whenever I want to get back in, I can take any one of my ten fingers and swipe it across the fingerprint reader that is on the front of the laptop. Now I’m ready to go again and can access all the data on the system.

People also tell me that encryption is slow. It’s not. I use my laptop to run large and involved programs all the time, so I need speed. And I have overkill encryption on my machine just to prove to audiences how fast it is. I have my data locked or encrypted three different ways, and it only needs to be encrypted once. This is to demonstrate the speed.

So in a nutshell, full disk encryption security is inexpensive, it’s easy for the user, it’s very important to have, and it’s easy for your IT administrators, too. So it’s time to be secure, and full-disk encryption is a great start to having some peace of mind.

Action Item: Investigate some full-disk encryption tools and make sure everyone in your office encrypts their data. Often encryption can be enforced for your employees that use computers belonging to your organization.