Imagine that you could take all of your personal information with you. Whenever you needed it you would have immediate access. Family photos, medical history, important documents...all right there whenever you need them.

Now imagine losing the device holding all that data.

Scary, ain't it? And it happens again and again. How many reports have we heard about lost laptops containing sensitive data?

And yet thumb drives have become increasingly popular as a way to take data with you. We need to stop and think about what we're putting on these drives and what the potential damage could be if it were to fall into the wrong hands.

I had a customer ask us about this recently. And quite honestly, despite being very security-aware and having over a quarter-century of experience in Information Technology, it never occurred to me. On the one hand, I would never put sensitive information on a thumb drive. But on the other...it didn't occur to me that others may not understand enough not to. And some of those others may have copies of my sensitive information: medical forms for Little League, for example. Do you have full control of your sensitive information? Do you know who has copies and how they are protecting it?

I dug into this and found that there is an Open Source program called TrueCrypt that can be used to encrypt data on any storage format, such as hard disks, CDs, and thumb drives. What's more is it uses encryption approved by the government for use up to the Top Secret level. And is uses one or more methods to protect the data from unauthorized use.

I tried this out for my customer and made a recommendation that they use TrueCrypt. And at the same time, being a mobile user with a laptop, Windows Mobile phone, and several different forms of portable media I've decided to take steps to encrypt all of my sensitive date - even on my home computers.