Friday, April 20, 2012

Security: The Name of the Enemy is Complacency

My laptop has an application that allows me to encrypt documents. I can only open an encrypted document with a password or a swipe of my finger.

Since I supposedly know that all systems fail, I maintained a back-up of a particular encrypted document - in an unencrypted form - elsewhere. Except I got complacent and didn't continue to update the document in its unencrypted form. An important distinction, this. Because I do have an automatic back-up of said document in its protected form.

But what happens when the encryption application goes to hell? Right. Can't access the document that's sitting right there, ready to be opened. Doesn't matter that I've got its encrypted clone sitting prettily on a cloud.

So now, because the magic key isn't working, I've got to recreate the most recent version of the doc.

Security's supposed to protect my stuff from other people, not from me.

Lesson learned, finally? Hopefully.

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