Member Avatar for kalel29x

Hi,

I am new to the forum.

I am working with a small investment company that happens to be situated have sensitive data on their computers. It is a subsidiary company that has very sensitive data such as government contracts, contracts involving large amounts.

The problem we are having is we are in a relatively very corrupt country in Africa and an incident last week prompted us to look hard at security.

Someone had bribed Law enforcement officials to come to my apartment and harass myself and my wife. They took my laptop which had very sensitive data on it and were looking through things that had nothing to do with the case. They later attempted to post personal photos in an attempt to discredit me. I currently have an agreement with a swiss data centre to provide me with hosting for email and potential cloud services in future. but I am now thinking to remove all data on my machine and keep most of it in the cloud.

Can anyone give me advice on how to tackle this problem?

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Good starting points from , and — full‑disk encryption (FDE) plus good habits is the baseline. Important updates for a reader years later: TrueCrypt was discontinued in 2014 and is no longer recommended; use maintained, audited tools for containers and prefer the OS native FDE for the boot drive. For message-level encryption, use a current OpenPGP/GnuPG workflow rather than ad‑hoc schemes. (en.wikipedia.org)

Practical baseline to implement immediately: enable the OS native FDE on every endpoint (BitLocker on Windows, FileVault on macOS, LUKS/dm‑crypt on Linux), back up recovery keys to a secure offline location, add pre‑boot authentication (TPM+PIN or firmware password), and power the machine off when not in your possession — FDE protects data at rest but not when the machine is unlocked. Follow vendor guides when enabling so you don’t lock yourself out. (learn.microsoft.com)

Keep only encrypted content in the cloud. Two safe patterns: (1) use a zero‑knowledge, end‑to‑end cloud provider so keys never leave your devices; or (2) layer client‑side encryption (for example Cryptomator or a VeraCrypt container) on top of any cloud storage so files and filenames are encrypted before upload. For confidential email, use GnuPG with careful key management and consider hardware smartcards for private keys. (cryptomator.org)

Operational tips and cautions: for physical transport use a hardware‑encrypted USB (Kingston/IronKey and equivalents), enable phishing‑resistant MFA with a hardware security key (YubiKey), set up remote‑erase for mobile and managed devices (Apple Find My / Intune), and keep encrypted offsite backups. Never store encryption keys and passwords in the same place as the encrypted data. Finally, recognize limits: encryption helps if devices are powered off or the drive removed, but it does not stop an attacker who gains access while the device is unlocked. (forbes.com)

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Member Avatar for Ewald Horn

Hi.

Even while using a cloud solution, you will have some data on your machine that is sensitive.

The best approach, even with a cloud host, is to encrypt your hard drive. Under Windows, you can use something like Check Point () that will encrypt the entire drive.

I know there's a program called TrueCrypt, and it works very well, but I have found it's cumbersome to use and because it's not transparent, people don't bother to keep all their sensitive information in the TrueCrypt vault.

For Linux, you can set up an encrypted file system (Fedora 19, for example, ships with this built-in).

The best security you can have though, is to be diligent. Make sure you lock your computing device when not near it. Make sure you delete all sensitive data that you do not absolutely need. Also, ensure you do not place anything sensitive on an unencrypted device.

I hope this helps.

commented: Great idea +9
Member Avatar for rch1231

Ewald has a good idea and TrueCrypt will encrypt you whole drive and can be set so that the computer will not boot with out the password. Or as a separate option you could carry a USB drive that was encrypted with encryption software but people get lazy about having to put in a USB drive and the password before they save a document to doing the whole drive is safest.

commented: Encrypted USB drive - good idea! +2
Member Avatar for NodePacket 
You can encrypt folders and hide them or use cloud storage. I have heard good PGP key protected emails also works great.
Member Avatar for kalel29x

hello gents,

do these softwares work on mac?

Member Avatar for rch1231

Truecrypt works with Windows, MAC and Linux

Member Avatar for kalel29x

thanks

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