Security Awareness: Portable Data Protection and Destruction

Course Overview
Hi, I'm Jason Helmick, an author here at Pluralsight, and welcome to my course, Portable Data Protection and Destruction. You know in our mobile society today, we need our data to be available with us wherever we go. This might include data from our company, customer information, and our own personal data, but there are numerous pieces of information about you or your company that is confidential. Even something so simple as meeting notes or an email exchange can contain sensitive material, so it's important to identify and protect this data from the prying eyes of a cybercriminal. How you transport and protect your data plays a big role in its security. So in this course, you will learn how to protect your portable data with gaining knowledge of malicious attacks, learn to identify those attacks, and how to stop from falling victim. You'll also learn how to be more proactive in avoiding this type of attack. So join me on this journey to start learning about cybersecurity and portable data protection and destruction. Here at Pluralsight we love learning, and we hope that you do too.

Dangers to Portable Data
We need access to our data wherever we're located, whether that be home, office, in the car, traveling, flying to some foreign country, doesn't matter, we want access to our data. That though means that we need to protect that data as we're in transit and when we use that data and, of course, being able to remove that data. So let's start to focus on that in looking at how to even find that data that we want to protect. So what we're going to do in this module is we're going to look at, well first of all, what does a cybercriminal want? What kind of data are they looking for, both at your business and at your home? Then, how to inventory and locate your data. Where are places that the data you care about the most going to be, and what's surprising is is that most people don't realize a lot of these particular locations. Then we're going to look at the modes of data, what data looks like when it's in transit and when it's at rest, and something that's very important, the CIA Triad. What is it specifically that we need to protect? Now I know you're saying well it's our data, but how and why do we need to protect that data? And something else I want to mention is the interception of communication when you are portable and traveling and how to avoid that. So let's get started with data in your business and at home.

Identifying Sensitive and Confidential Data
Not all of the data that you have on your device or that you carry around with you is sensitive data. Think about this for a second. Your business card, what does it have on it? It probably has your name, the address of your business, and your phone number? You may have a private card that has the same information. And think about this. Some places still make, what are those things, phonebooks, where it has your name, your address, and your telephone number. Not everything about you is confidential. Some things it's okay to make public. You even want them made public. The question is is when you're trying to protect your mobile devices, how do you make this decision? And when you're at your place of business, has the decision already been made for you? Possibly. So that's what we want to take a look at in this module. We're going to take a look at what do you really need to protect? I know that in the last module we talked about being aware of what applications you installed and what things held it data, but now, what kind of data do you actually need to protect in the first place? And then we want to take a look at whether you work for the government or you work for some other business, they may have their own classifications of data, and you might already be familiar with dealing with them. I just want to review those and why those companies have those in place. So let's get started with, well, What do you really need to protect?

Safely and Securely Storing Data on Portable Devices
So far in this course, we've been talking about everything that can go wrong. Let's go ahead and talk about some things that can finally go right, like how do we protect our portable data? All of that data on all of those devices. So let's take a look at those best practice. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to start off by looking at what are the best things that you can do that'll protect your data in most situations? There are a lot of little tiny things for very specific cases that you can do, but overall what's the very best that you can do? That's what we're going to focus on. We're also going to talk about authentication protection a little bit more. In other words, what does a good password look like? And talk about encryption, how to encrypt your data and to make sure that it stays confidential. So let's get started with the best practices.

Safely and Securely Removing Data from a Device
Bet I got your attention now. So we're going to look at removing data from our devices, and no this is not a joke. As a matter of fact, I've done this quite a bit. I want to get rid of the data on this device. How do I ensure that nobody else can ever pull the data off of this? Unfortunately, the reset programs on here, they are very good. Don't get me wrong. They will delete the data, but there are some hackers out there that are finding ways to pull some of that data back. And while I'm sure Apple and Android are working on this problem right as we speak, there's still a possibility. So sometimes, I want to ensure there's no way you could get data off this phone. I'm going to physically destroy the device. Let's talk about that and more about removing your data. So in this module, it's going to be pretty brief. We're going to look at the physical removal of data. Yep, that's the hammer routine and why that actually exists. And, of course, we're going to look at a more nondestructive way, which is the software removal of data, but let's get started with the fun one, the physical removal of data.