EMAIL AND DOCUMENT SECURITY

PARTICULARLY RELATED TO COMPUTERS YOU DO NOT OWN

Part 2

Remember from the first part of this article the primary issue is how to safeguard email and documents that contain confidential material. In that article I proposed four scenarios where private information can be compromised. These are summarized as: (for details see article 1)

1. A thief steals the computer
2. A Hacker breaks in on line
3. Church members or students "nose" around out of curiosity
4. Those representing the owners deliberately enter the computer seeking private information on the assumption that since the computer belongs to those who paid for it all in the computer also is open to their scrutiny.

While the theft of a computer as in scenario number 1 may very well happen rarely are those stealing the computers interested in the information on a church or collegiate ministry computer. They want to resell the hardware.

A good firewall such as Zone Alarm available free at www.zonelabs.com should give you adequate protection in the case of scenario number 2

It is scenarios 3 and 4 that shall be the focus of the rest of this article since these are the ones most likely to lead to the compromise of confidential information either in emails or in written documents.

The first approach is free but is by far the least secure. This is the approach of using a password to block access to the computer. This is an approach that is easily circumvented by many knowledgeable computer people and with some "hacker programs". It may be enough to keep out the idly curious but don't count on it keeping out a teenager wanting to show off his or her computer abilities. You need more than this.

The second approach is relatively new and should be quite effective. I have not tried it so do not know the possible work arounds. This approach involves a device either USB connected or for laptops a PC card slot device that actually checks your figure print to authenticate the use of the computer. Both devices are made by Targus. The USB one sells presently (3/03) for c.$130 and the PC card one for c. $180. On the USB version don't worry if you have an older computer with just one USB port. This unit has a two-USB port integrated into it.

A third approach is somewhat similar to the two above in the sense that it uses a lockout approach. This one uses a so-called Keydrive USB approach. It involves a USB device that must be in place and a 4-digit pin number to be entered before access can be gained to the data.

All three of the above methods in my opinion share the same weakness. The data is on the harddrive and thus can be recovered. The fourth approach involves an external unit of some type and setting up your email client so that instead of incoming and out going email ever going to your internal hard drive it goes directly to the external device. By never leaving the external device in the office you achieve the same level of privacy protection you once had when you took you notes with you in your brief case. The problem until recently has been that external devices were somewhat large and clumsy to carry or – in the case of zip drives – required that you have one at the office and one at home if you were going to protect your information by storing it on a zip disk.

The hardware solution I suggest is a USB Drive similar to the one pictured below. To give you an idea of the size I have placed dimes near it to give you some prospective. It is approximately as thick as a stack of 6 dimes. This particular one holds 128mb of data and I bought it through McAfee for c. $80.00. There are similar ones on the market under other names such as Transend selling for slightly more. You could even buy one that holds a full 1 Gig of data but it would cost nearly $800.00 To give you an idea of how many emails you can store in 128mb of space, I at present have 2,012 emails stored in Outlook Express (I suspect more than many of you). They use 42mb of space. You can see why I feel 128mb is plenty for most of us.

It is easy to set up, but be warned: If it is not handled carefully disaster looms. Handled properly it is clearly the answer to computer email security. The drive comes with a USB 3 ft extension cable in case your USB connection is hard to get to. There is no software to install. Just plug it in and boot, the computer takes care of the rest. It is called a flash drive and is lettered what ever your next available letter is. Create a folder on the flash drive and change the location of your email storage folder to the flash drive. From then on you will be sending your emails to your flash drive with nothing ever touching the hard drive. When you close down your computer take out the USB(flash) drive and take it with you. Your files are safe. For details on relocating your emails to the flash drive and a special warning click here.

Since you normally would have additional space left on the USB drive you can also use it as a regular drive to store any documents which you want to keep confidential such as articles in progress, etc. One final suggestion, since losing your address book can be so disastrous I suggest normally exporting it to the USB drive every time you make a change in your address book. For help in doing this click here.

You can protect yourself and your information if you choose to.

Think about it and ACT!

March 25, 2003