Jonathan Cusick

With the rapid expansion of e-commerce and social networking over the last few years it has become necessary for most users to store personal information, passwords and even financial information on their machines, this information is then inevitability then stored on a USB flash drive at some point. This has brought about a rather worrying security loophole as it means that if your flash drive gets stolen or misplaced that someone could then easily obtain this sensitive information.

I have been approached about this issue on many occasions and surprisingly after conducting an array research it appears that hardly any USB flash drives are shipped with a method for users to securely encrypt their data. After taking this problem into consideration and looking into the open source encryption software available, there is an easy solution to this problem and its thanks to an application called TrueCrypt.

TrueCrypt enables the user to easily encrypt their data from a wide range of industry standard algorithms. Basically you just have to load the appropriate TrueCrypt files on to your flash drive and then select an encryption algorithm and select the amount of memory you want to dedicate to being secure (kind of like a secure vault for your data). In order to encrypt you files you simply mount the secure area of your pen drive and copy the files into it has you normally would then dismount it when finished. I was initially going to create a step by step tutorial in order to show how this can be achieved, however before I started I discovered an excellent tutorial which can be found here.