Ten Ways to Dodge CyberBullets, Part 7

This is the seventh in a series and is an update to our top 10 things that people can do to protect themselves against malicious activity we provided to our clients two years ago.

7. Call for backup

If sensitive information is stored on your hard drive (and if you don’t have something worth protecting on your system, you’re probably not reading this paper), protect it with encryption.

Furthermore, when you copy or move data elsewhere, it’s usually at least as important to protect/encrypt it when it’s on removable media, or transferred electronically. Even if the target storage device is secure from malware or hacking, you also need to be aware of other dangers such as physical risks, transit risks, business-related risks.

Consider (seriously) regularly backing up your data to a separate disk (as a minimum) and, where possible, a remote site or facility. Sounds extreme? Think about it.

You can’t rely on backing up to another partition on the same disk as the original; if the disk dies, the chances are that all partitions will be lost.

You can’t rely on backing up to another disk on the same system. If the system is stolen, or there’s a fire, for instance, then in the immortal words of Tom Lehrer, they’ll “all go together.” In the latter instance, the chances are that you’ll lose your thumb drives, CD-RWs and so on as well.

And if you’re working in a corporate environment, you might want to avoid doing what some of the accounts we took over have done in the past – back up data to a server, but forget to back up the server itself.