How To: Share Sensitive Files with a Third Party

You need to share a document, video or audio file with a third party, but the files are filled with sensitive information. What options should you consider?

Three possibilities come to mind: email, Dropbox or flash drive.

Sending an email is the same thing as sending a postcard through US Mail. Email remains wide open when it comes to security or lack there of. This is true and scary; anyone who wants to read your email (not just the NSA) can read your email.

Most times you can send sensitive documents through email and nothing will happen – roll of the dice really. However; you are playing Russian roulette (almost literally, given a recent theft of 1.2 billion email account credentials by a Russian gang). Remember, the topic of this post is about sharing sensitive data with a third party.

The next option would encrypting the email attached in the email. Encryption is a great option and certainly more secure than sending the email without encryption. You could run into a file size limitation though. Most videos will be larger than a 20MB, which is (generally) the maximum file size one could attached in an email. Encryption is a good next step, but there is a bigger issue at hand than file size. More about that in a few.

Dropbox is the next option on our list for how to share sensitive data with a third party. Dropbox is a great option when you have larger files. With Dropbox you could upload those big audio or video files and provide a download link for your recipient. Dropbox doesn’t encrypt your data by default so there is some exposure there. A quick and relatively safe method to encrypt your files using Windows would be compressing the video into a zip file and assigning it a password. Encrypting the data will provide that extra layer of security. As with an encrypted email, the encrypted Dropbox alternative also has a major flaw.

Ask yourself, “Do you trust the person receiving the document?”

If you cannot answer that question with absolute certainty, then sending sensitive documents to a third party using encryption is not the most secure method. It is important to understand, with encryption the files are secure while in transit from the sender to the recipient, but once the recipient puts in the password to decrypt the file, they can do anything they want with it. When the password decrypts the file, all the security goes away. When dealing with legal matters and sharing sensitive data with third parties, a major criteria will be to insure the file cannot be changed, manipulated or put into the wrong hands. With that in mind, copy protection is the better alternative for sharing sensitive data.

It is important to understand the difference between encryption and copy protection. Both technologies use encryption to protect the file, the big difference is trust of the user for the protected file. With encryption the only security feature is the password. Encryption is great for protecting files when the user is in your circle of trust. Think of your computer back-up files stored on a USB flash drive and that drive is dropped in a parking lot by mistake. Anyone who found the drive could not view the data because the data is encrypted with a password. They could not see your back-up files unless the correct password was entered.

Let us change the scenario just a little.

In this scenario, sensitive files are to be shared with a third party whom you don’t necessarily trust. It is important the files have a password to insure only the intended recipient can view the files and in addition, you need security to make sure the recipient cannot save the files, print the files, stream, share, upload or export the files. By changing the situation to this scenario one can see the value with copy protection is greater than the value of encryption. As with copy protection, the file can only be viewed, nothing else can be done with the file.

The last option from our original list is the USB flash drive.

As with email and Dropbox, one could encrypt the files and place them on a flash drive and send to the third party. But as we just discussed and highlighted, encryption is not the best solution for this situation. A Copy Secure flash drive which provides USB copy protection is the best alternative for this situation. The Copy Secure flash drive is manufactured by Nexcopy and carries a variety of features specifically designed for sharing files with “not so trusted” recipients.

Copy Secure flash drives offer copy protection on USB sticks

The Copy Secure flash drive is write protected after the data is put on the drive. This means the flash drive is read-only. It is impossible to format the drive, delete the files on the drive or manipulate the files on the drive. The write protection feature is done at the hardware controller level, it is not a software solution, which means the most secure method for locking the device. The files on the drive are encrypted. A viewer application runs from the flash drive for either a Windows computer or Mac computer which displays the files. The viewer application is very secure and blocks the ability to save the file, print the file, screen capture, stream or export the files.

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What Comes After the Dead Optical Drive?

Let’s face it, optical discs are large and bulky. At nearly five inches in diameter, the discs are big when compared to the size of modern laptops and now tablets. Even though the optical drives has been greatly reduced in size, more and more laptops have dropped the technology to conserve on space and power.

If you are not talking about the size of the mobile computer, the space used up by an optical drive can be used for more practical things. That space could be better used for the battery which can extend the overall running time of the system. If the system is designed for performance, it could store a better or bigger solid state drive in addition to a hard drive for added performance. Maybe the computer could use a better graphics solution for graphic design or gaming.

When CD-R drives first came into the market, they offered a huge storage capacity that rivaled traditional magnetic media of the day. After all, 650 megabytes of storage was well beyond what most hard drives were at the time. DVD expanded this capacity even further with 4.7 gigabytes of storage on the recordable formats.

While the growth rate of optical media was good, it is nowhere near the exponential growth that hard drives and USB sticks have seen. Optical storage is still stuck in the gigabytes while most hard drives are pushing even more terabytes. Using the CD, DVD and Blu-ray for storing data is just not worth it anymore. The write time is too slow and the seek time to find your data is equally as slow. The hard drive and it’s portable version, USB flash drive have found the main stream masses.

Keeping these points in mind, you can see why optical media is all but dead. Sure, the CD-R and DVD-R will last another year, probably another five, but it’s USB and hard drives which have taken over. The next step in the logical progression, is how to data load USB media? With optical media you had CD and DVD tower duplicators. There are many systems with robotics and printers so duplicate to the optical media and also print a label. But those systems are getting harder and harder to find.

The equipment most companies and organizations are seeking now are USB duplicators. These are flash memory copier systems which can data load content to USB flash drives at ultra-fast speeds. CD and DVD duplicators went through some phases of supported formats like discs being finalized or disc-at-once over track-at-once. Well, USB duplicators have a similar issue to resolve. There is file copy and binary copy and duplication from an ISO file or an IMG file. There are many ways to copy the data from the source to the target USB media.

It’s important to have a USB duplicator which supports all these functions. There are some duplicators with as many as six copy modes. A system like this makes it extremely versatile for the user to move data around. There is file copy, copy add, unique data streaming, copy from a physical device, copy from an IMG file, copy from an ISO file. These are all great resources to have if you are not sure how the content is being given to you.

Erase USB or Clean USB or Format USB?

We’ve seen these terms floating around in forums and How To’s for years when someone is explaining what to do with USB flash drives. I think most people glaze over the definitions of Clean, Erase and Format simply because they believe the terms are interchangeable, or they aren’t planning on doing the task mentioned in the post.

I hope the following information will clear up some terms and definitions so we can all better understand what people are talking about when passing along information about flash drives and the Clean, Erase and Format function.

All of these functions can be performed in your Windows 10 computer, or higher. I will start with the least complicated definition and task, and move along from there.

Format

This function is what 98% of Windows computer operators will use. This is the graphical interface inside Windows when you right click a drive letter and ask the operating system to format the drive. What is this function really doing?

Format is the least complicated of the tasks, and this function is removing the File Allocation Table of the USB and creating a new one. Said a simpler way… this function takes away the list of files sitting on the drive so it then appears blank with no data.

It’s important to note, the files are still on the drive, just not listed in an easy, organized manor which you can see through windows explorer (clicking on the drive letter to see the list of files).

Using the most basic file recovery software tools, like the one we wrote about several months back, you can recover all the files sitting on the drive.

Maybe a picture will help. Looking at the image below you can see the “data” is light grey. Meaning the data is still there, just not easily accessible. This data is what recovery software will look for, find, and list back on your drive. Also notice the boot code of the USB (if you want to load an operating system on your USB stick) isn’t touched either.

You might have questions if a USB flash drive should be formatted as FAT, FAT32, exFAT or NTFS and we did a great post about that a bit earlier as well.

Clean

The Clean function is a bit more in-depth than the format function. This function applies directly to the Master Boot Record (MBR) or boot code mentioned just above.

The Clean function will clear out boot code and will remove any partition on the flash drive. The partition of a flash drive is the information which tells a host computer how big the drive is, and if the partition should be bootable in the event you are trying to start the computer from a flash drive.

The Clean function is not accessible through the GUI of Windows, for example you cannot right click on a drive letter and find the Clean function. The Clean function is only accessible through the Windows utility called DiskPart.

Solution: Windows Does Not Assign Drive Letter to Flash Drive

Problem Issue:

This is happening on Win8 and Windows 10.

When I remove a USB drive and reconnect it, Windows will not assign a drive letter. Clearly this is a problem as every other computer I use assigns a drive letter.

There are three solutions. All of which will work.

1) You can go into Disk Management and select the device and assing a drive letter. This is a manual process and not ideal for each time you plug in a flash drive.
2) Good chance the driver or registry entry for that device is rogue or corrupt. Use this USBScrub tool to remove the registry entry. Chances are this will fix the problem. USBScrub link
3) Use ‘diskpart’ and enable the automount feature.

• Open Command Prompt as Administrator (search for Command Prompt in the Start Menu, right click, Run as Administrator)
• Type ‘diskpart’ and hit Enter.
• Once in the ‘diskpart’ command prompt type ‘automount enable’ and hit Enter.
• Type ‘exit’ and click Enter

For solution number one from above, Disk Management is really the GUI version for diskpart, but a GUI (Graphical User Interface) which has scaled down functions from what all the things diskpart can really do.

Diskpart has 37 commands that you can do very cool things with. The 38th command is