I hope you aren't walking around with all your important stuff or backups on an unencrypted thumb drive or portable hard drive!
You have a password on your computer, right? That's good, but what about that tiny little key fob sized flash drive that you use to bring stuff back and forth from work to home? What if you dropped that tiny little thing somewhere? What's to keep people from picking it up, popping it in their computer and looking through all of what have you?
The answer is "encryption." Be sure that your portable drives and flash memory sticks are encrypted. On a Mac it's very, very easy. Take your flashy new flash drive, plug it in to the USB port and start "Disk Utility."
Find the drive in the left part of the utility window and click on it.
Click on the "Erase" tab near the top of the window.
Click on the "Format" pop-up list in the center portion of the window and choose "Mac OS Extended, Journaled, Encrypted," and then click "Erase…"
Enter a good password in the window that pops up. (One that you can remember but one that is not easily guessed. I've posted some other entries on the necessity of having good passwords
here.) Now, click on "Erase."
When Disk Utility is done, you'll have a secure thumb drive. One that will refuse to mount on any computer unless the password is entered. You can, and should, do the same with portable hard drives.
On many levels, Identity Theft is the result of data breaches at large corporations, computer web sites, and governmental databases and there is little we can do on an individual basis. But, this is one little step that you can take to secure your own data, prevent data theft and data loss. It contributes much more to your cyber well being than continually worrying about large scale identity theft.
