Disk encryption likely to hinder law enforcement efforts

Hope you had a fantastic Thanksgiving!  We sure did, but we are back at work.

While reading an article over on physorg entitled “Research team finds disk encryption foils law enforcement efforts“, I was reminded of conversations from over a dozen years ago with friends in law enforcement about how criminals were using PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) to encrypt their files, from the records of bookies to prostitutes and their client list. We discussed how this simple form of encrypting files would be almost impossible for an investigator to circumvent.

File, folder and entire disk encryption has come a long way since then and is affordable and easy to implement by the typical user of a computer. While it has not become “mainstream”, you can bet that criminals are busily integrating encryption into their storage.

One point they make in the article is that if the police raid the home/business of a (suspected?) criminal, they are likely to find the computer/s on and running. If they can manage to get them in this state, they may be able to move around the drives/folders and copy files to another device. If the criminal shuts the computer down, (or the police do so to move it to their lab) upon bootup or access of the encrypted drive/folder, an encryption key/passphrase would need to be input. Some of these encryption packages are destructive, so if an incorrect attempt is made X number of times, the data becomes totally unusable, even for the legitimate owner.

If you would like to utilize encryption in your home or business to protect against criminals (hopefully not law enforcement), we can help. Shoot us an email to info@homelandsecureit.com or call 864.990.4748 if you are in the Upstate or Greenville SC area and we can assist with protecting your precious data, whether it is a flash drive, usb drive, a folder, a file or an entire drive on your computer.