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Flash Drive Scare

Has this happened to you?  I copied a document from my laptop to a flash drive so I could give it to a colleague.  She copied the document and handed it back to me.  I put it in my laptop bag where I always keep my hoard of flash drives.  My son grabbed one so he could take his presentation to school.  You can see where this is going.  He took the flash drive to school and copied its contents onto a class laptop for his presentation.  Low and behold he copied my document and yes, there was confidential information in it.
  
I found out about this because the teacher happened to notice there were some files that didn’t belong on the laptop.  The kids were using Microsoft PowerPoint and this was a spreadsheet.  Fortunately the teacher deleted the file.  If the teacher was either unaware or curious, there could have been some serious damage.  And what if another kid saw the file, copied it and posted it somewhere on the internet?  Without persistent document level security on it, the file is fair game to anyone.  In this case, no harm, no foul.  But imagine what might have happened.
  
How safe are the documents on your flash drives? 
  
Photo credit Ambuj Saxena

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