This Thanksgiving, Americans will consume 690 million pounds of turkey. We'll double the number of long distance trips we make during the six-day holiday period and as many as 65 million of us will travel to join our friends and family for the celebrations. And amongst the mayhem and joy, in shops, trains and stations, opportunistic thieves will seize the chance to steal laptops, USB keys and MP3 players.
Each year over two million notebook computers are reported stolen in the US. The hardware loss can be covered by insurance. The greater risk is that data on the PC is used for identity theft, one of the fastest growing crimes. Many people use their computers for online banking, e-commerce, household accounts and personal correspondence. Information on the computer could be exploited to rack up credit and buy goods in the owner's name. There's also the embarrassment that could be caused by health information, love letters and bad poetry being published online.
As people increasingly work from home and on the move, corporate data is at risk too. If confidential information is lost, particularly customers' personal data, it can irreparably damage an organization's reputation.
It's not only laptops that are at risk. Data is increasingly moved around on USB keys or MP3 players and desktop PCs are at greater risk when homes and businesses are left empty over the holiday season.
So before you plan your Thanksgiving trip, think about your data. The best defense is to encrypt sensitive information, so that even if the hardware that stores it is stolen, your secrets are safe.
This isn't as difficult as you might think. Easy-to-use and affordable software now enables you to encrypt all your personal banking details, emails, confidential company information and even your browser's favorites list. Whether those files are on your laptop, PC, USB key or even on an iPod or MP3 player, you can be confident that the data is unintelligible and worthless to anyone but you. Leading commercial products now use encryption algorithms that are deemed secure enough to protect 'Top Secret' data by the Department of Defense.
The latest innovation means you don't necessarily have to remember more passwords either: you can use a USB key, mobile phone or digital camera to store the decryption key. The key device works like a real key, unlocking your data when it is connected to the computer.
There is no longer a good reason not to encrypt your data. The cost of the software is a tiny investment compared to the risk of loss, or compared even to the cost of insuring the hardware.
Before you pack your bags to join your family this Thanksgiving, check our tips for protecting your data on the move. You'll thank us for it.
Nine Top Tips for Keeping your Mobile Data Safe:
1. Protect the data: Encrypt your sensitive data on your laptop and PC as well as on any USB keys or MP3 players you use to store data.
2. Be strong: Use a password containing a mixture of numbers and letters. Good encryption software will tell you how strong a chosen password is. If you're struggling to create a memorable password, try using the initial letters from the words in the first line in a song. It will create a meaningless sequence of letters you can easily recreate by remembering which song you used.
3. Use a key: If remembering passwords is a problem, encrypt the data so that the secure drives can be opened using a USB stick, storage card, digital camera or a mobile phone.
4. Store passwords separately: If you're using a key device such as a digital camera to unlock your data, store it separately from the storage medium it's protecting. Ideally, you shouldn't write down passwords. If you do, keep them separate from the encrypted data.
5. Don't tempt thieves: Keep your laptop out of sight in cars and away from windows at home. Keep hold of it in public places.
6. Don't advertise laptops: Laptop bags have all the pockets you could ever need but they alert everyone to the fact that you are carrying a laptop. Use a less obvious bag.
7. Use the safe: When in a hotel, always keep your laptop in a safe even when leaving the room for a short time.
8. Shred it: Make sure that any data you no longer need is irretrievably destroyed using dedicated shredder software. Deleting a file on your PC only hides it from view and it can be recovered until other files have overwritten it.
9. Protect data online: As you work remotely, use an encrypted VPN connection to ensure that your data can't be intercepted at a wi-fi hotspot or further down the internet. Make sure that you encrypt any confidential emails too.
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