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One Step Ahead
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April 21, 2009, Volume 55, No. 30

One Step Ahead

Another tip in a series provided by the Offices of Information Systems & Computing and Audit, Compliance & Privacy.

Exchange Sensitive Data Securely Using Secure Share

Distributing and sharing important data and files electronically has become such an integral part of our jobs and lives in recent years that most of us routinely send sensitive and confidential information in the form of e-mail attachments or file transfers through instant messaging clients, despite frequent reminders from our IT support staff about the insecure nature of these methods. To help reduce and mitigate the risks inherent in distributing electronic files over insecure channels, Penn’s Information Systems and Computing division (ISC) recently inaugurated Secure Share, a free service which affords Penn faculty and staff the opportunity to exchange sensitive files.

With an easy-to-use web-based client, Secure Share users can send any number and type of file—spreadsheets, word processing documents, database extracts and more—to any number of recipients, and each file will be securely encrypted at every stage of the process, whether in transit during upload or download or at rest in the system awaiting retrieval by recipients using the same web client. The application also provides the option to notify the recipients via e-mail and add a comment as well. Once files have been uploaded into the Secure Share application they are available to the designated recipients for 30 days, and once all recipients have downloaded a given file it is securely deleted from the application.

If you are a Penn faculty or staff member, remember that this valuable new service is free­—all you need is your PennKey and password. For a more detailed description of Secure Share including a link to the login page for the application itself, visit: www.upenn.edu/computing/security/secure-share/.

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To receive weekly OneStepAhead  tips via email, send email to listserv@lists.upenn.edu with the following text in the body of the message:  sub one-step-ahead <your name>.

For additional tips, see the One Step Ahead link on the Information Security website: www.upenn.edu/computing/security/.

Almanac - April 21, 2009, Volume 55, No. 30