Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity for the travelling scientist

Cybersecurity concerns can be particularly acute when crossing international borders. Some regions have a reputation for hacking, and border guards might insist on seeing files.

What can researchers do to keep their data safe from prying eyes on the road? It depends on your data and the threats you're likely to face, says Morgan Marquis-Boire, director of security for First Look Media in San Francisco, California, who has experience helping government whistle-blowers travel with sensitive data. Are you concerned mostly about overzealous border guards, opportunistic theft or government-sponsored hacking?

It's like chatting with a physician, he says. “If you ask a doctor how to be healthy, you'll get general advice. But it will be different if you're going to the jungle.”

Whatever the perceived threat, the first step in data protection, says Marquis-Boire, is encryption — rendering data unreadable by mathematically transforming them with an electronic key (see ‘Dos and don'ts’). This simple step can protect against casual theft and deter all but the most determined hackers. “The number one thing we push for is encryption of data, whole-disk encryption of portable devices especially,” says John Southall, a data librarian at the University of Oxford, UK.