If you are a business user or a company, data protection regulations such as the GDPR or HIPAA might be mandatory, meaning you’ll need to encrypt your data to avoid costly fines. As long as your private key is secret, your encryption system is safe. You use your private key to decrypt data that was encrypted with your public key. Asymmetric encryption consists of a public key, which you can share publicly and use to encrypt data, and a private key, which you must keep secret. We discuss this more below.) ProtonMail, for example, uses symmetric-key cryptography in the end-to-end encryption it applies to all emails exchanged between two ProtonMail users.Įncryption is broadly categorized into two types - symmetric (AES, Twofish, Triple DES) and asymmetric (RSA) - based on whether the encryption and decryption keys are the same. (This is how symmetric-key cryptography works.

This same key is then also used to convert data back into a legible format. This transformation is specified by the encryption key. What is encryption?Įncryption uses a complex algorithm to convert a message into a string of characters that are illegible. If you encrypt your flash drive, it is much more difficult for attackers to get unauthorized access to the data it contains, even if they steal it or you misplace it. Hackers can find a way to put even the most seemingly innocuous data to use for their malicious attacks. Even if you are not handling patients’ personal health information on your flash drive, you will want to keep it secure. 9, 2019, the New York City Fire Department had to notify over 10,000 patients because an FDNY employee had lost an external hard drive that contained seven years’ worth of medical records.ĭata breaches like this can be avoided if you encrypt your USB peripherals and external storage devices. In many cases, the result is a damaging data breach.

But what happens if you lose or misplace one of these devices? And they are becoming more critical as modern-day schooling, work, and life are increasingly awash in data. USB peripherals (commonly known as “flash drives”), memory cards, and external hard drives all make backing up and sharing your data simple.

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