Data is an important asset of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and its security is vital to the normal operation of the University. All staff and students of the University share the responsibility of protecting the important data of the University and individuals. Therefore, it is necessary for us to strengthen data protection in the following key areas:

• Ensure that all sensitive data and important documents are encrypted, especially during storage and transmission.
• Perform regular data backups, preferably using encrypted cloud services, to prevent data loss or corruption.
• Strictly manage the use of USB ports on computers and mobile devices to avoid the risk of data leakage and virus intrusion.
• When disposing of used storage media, ensure that data is completely erased and, if necessary, physical destruction measures are should be taken.

Protect and Encrypt Your Files

The following files support encryption for data protection, so be sure to memorize the encryption password. If you lose the password, you will not be able to recover or otherwise access these encrypted files.

MICROSOFT OFFICE FILES

Microsoft Office comes with a password encrypting function to protect Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentation files. This is a handy tool for preventing unauthorized access. Visit the following webpage for further details and instructions. Please click here.

PDF

Adobe Acrobat provides password encryption to limit access to pdf files and prevent unauthorized people from opening them. This is a commercial proprietary software for pdf editing.Encrypted pdf files can only be edited by commercial software like Adobe Acrobat. However, password-protected files can be opened by Adobe Reader. For more details on Adobe Acrobat PDF protection, please click here.

ZIP UTILITY

If the files you want to protect have different types of format, you can simply archive them into a single zip file with password protection. For more details, please click here.

Backup of personal data

For critically important data, follow the well-respected 3-2-1 backup rule. This rule recommends that you should maintain at least three copies of your data: two on separate local media and one in a remote location. For larger but less valuable data, a local backup is sufficient. The followings are ways to implement a backup strategy:

• External Storage Backup: Utilizes an external hard drive or USB drive to back up data on a regular basis.
• Network Attached Storage (NAS): Back up your data by connecting to a NAS device through your home or office network.
• Cloud Services Backup: Use cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or iCloud to access your data from anywhere.
• System image backup: Create a full image backup of your operating system containing system files, applications and user data.

With these methods, you can ensure that your data is safe and can be quickly recovered in case of data loss.

Handle USB Drives with Care

Loss of unencrypted USB drives is one of the top causes of data leaks. To reduce the chance of sensitive information leaks, please adhere to the following ITSO guidelines:

• Avoid storing the University data on a USB drive, especially any personal identity material. Consider accessing the data remotely(through the web, email or remote desktop connection) if you are working at home or are on travel.
• Use data encryption when storing sensitive data on a USB drive. Do not only rely on the “secure” USB drives in the market, unless you are confident about their encryption. You can easily turn an ordinary USB drive into a secure storage device using free software. ITSO recommends to use Bitlocker  to encrypt your drive. It is user-friendly, supports industrial standard encryption methods and it is free. For more details, please click here.

Dispose of Your Hard Disk Securely

There is a common misconception that deleting files or reformatting a drive deletes data on a computer’s hard disk can erase all data within the device. This is not the case as data never truly goes away. Disposing of a computer’s hard disk drive therefore needs to be given special consideration.

Use software that will not only wipe your hard disk clean, but overwrite it with random patterns of data. This makes it hard to recover old data(such as for example, confidential files). Eraser, one of the most popular free tools, allows you to set the number of “passes”, i.e. the number of times it overwrites all the data on the disk. The more passes you specify, the longer the procedure will take. Generally, one or two should be enough for most people’s needs.

You can download the latest version. Please click here to download the latest version of the tool's installer.

Also, for confidential data, consider degaussing with a demagnetization device or using a third-party processing service to degauss and drill holes in disks and tapes.